With "Warming" Conference Near,
Treaty Talks Still In Disarray

BONN, Germany — With an early December deadline fast approaching, promoters of a worldwide treaty on so-called "global warming" remain severely divided over the details. Critics insist they would be in even worse shape if they had opened their negotiations to people who have differing scientific opinions.

The latest talks on a proposed U.N. pact to fight global warming ended in deadlock recently, negotiators unable to merge a set of complicated proposals into a cohesive draft treaty.

Diplomats from 142 countries left the 10-day session at odds over how much and how quickly industrial nations should cut emissions of heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" in the next century.

"We still have a lot of points to clarify," meeting chairman Raul Estrada-Oyuela of Argentina told a news conference. He said the draft treaty was still a "mosaic of different positions."

Environmental activist groups accused the United States and Japan of setting back the talks, which were complicated at the last minute by a long-awaited U.S. proposal that most European and developing nations called too modest.

Government ministers are likely to be left with the toughest choices when they meet Dec. 1-10 in Kyoto, Japan, to complete the pact.

"It's a monster," United Nations spokesman Michael Williams said. "It's not surprising it's going down to the wire."

At issue are emissions of gases, mainly carbon dioxide released in burning fossil fuels, that some scientists contend are leading to a heat buildup in the atmosphere that could cause huge climate shifts. Other scientists dispute that contention, but they have been excluded from the treaty deliberations.

Despite the differences and tremendous uncertainties, the 15-nation European Union wants industrial nations to slash emissions by 15 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, a target backed by many developing countries who would not be required to meet it.

The U.S. plan, as proposed by the Clinton administration, would supposedly bring emissions back to 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012; cuts below that level would follow in the next five years. How and even whether the Clinton proposal would work is unclear because the plan contains almost no details.

The one thing uniting negotiators is their refusal to consider that their whole treaty exercise may be in vain — unnecessary and potentially even destructive.

Scientists who attempt to point that out are generally ignored and often vilified, even though their credentials are at least as good — and in most cases better — than those of "global warming" promoters.

Among the dissenters are 11 leading meteorologists who last week signed a statement questioning global warming contentions.

The statement endorsed the finding of an international symposium held in 1995 in Leipzig, Germany.

The signers said they disagreed with claims that the earth's temperature is climbing. "In fact, some of the meteorological evidence acquired from global satellite data indicates slight cooling over the last 20 years," the signers said in the statement Thursday.

Computer models on global warming "have not proven themselves to be accurate in the past and are based on theory," the statement added.

A recent Forbes magazine article outlined the opposing position, citing renowned atmospheric scientists who dispute the notion of "global warming."

Even though promoters claim the theory is supported by "2500 scientists," the Forbes article points out, few of the scientists ever said that; the global warming claim is not made in the massive report on which they signed off, just in a "summary" concocted by an Al Gore appointee. The article notes that the "summary" and the document it allegedly summarizes actually come to distinctly different conclusions on the issue.

Among others, the article quotes Peter P. Rogers, Ph.D., a highly respected Harvard environmental scientist. Rogers told Forbes that the document most environmental activists point to for support of their global warming thesis is a report released in 1995 by the 2500 oft-cited scientists on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Hardly anyone has or ever will read the actual report, Rogers pointed out, because the report itself contains "almost 2000 scientifically dense pages."

Its conclusion is clear, however.

"It says we [scientists] aren't sure what is happening, and we need at least five more years to study the problem," says Rogers.

Most of the media comment, however, is based on a seven-page so-called "executive summary" that says something entirely different.

"The summary, which everyone reads, bears little relationship to the actual report, which was written by the scientists," says Rogers.

That "summary" was largely written by Robert Watson, then the associate director of environment at the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, an Al Gore appointee.

As to charges that the scientific panel’s "executive committee" voted to approve the summary, Rogers points out that the committee members were chosen for political reasons and "diversity," not for their qualifications as environmental scientists.

For instance, "Instead of looking for an expert in a field of study, the panel needed to fill a position with an African scientist or a woman. Debates were judged by votes rather than reasoning," Rogers told Forbes.

Then there’s the claim that half of the world's living Nobel laureates in science signed a petition condemning global warming.

Rogers said most of the laureates are "nice people and, for the most part, good scientists," but few know much about environmental science or climate change.

"Most of these Nobel laureates are busy people," said Rogers. "They aren't going to spend all of their time learning about climate change."

By contrast, he noted, two of the three climatologists who have won Nobel prizes disagree with the theory of global warming.

Rogers told Forbes that the only thing scientists really know about "global warming" is that the level of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere is rising; everything beyond that is conjecture.

Activists claim that rise in CO2 is causing a "greenhouse effect" and raising global temperatures, but Rogers doesn’t buy it. He calls it a "credible hypothesis" — but nothing more.

"Rising CO2 could also be due to something we don't know about," he told Forbes.

For example, he said, most scientists agree that ocean currents and winds play a major role in global climate, but those factors aren’t even included in the computer models that forecast global warming.

That omission leads to "absurd" predictions, the article says, such as a forecast of flooding in Death Valley.

Most of the global warming models also exclude the effects of cloud cover, which Rogers considers the most important factor in determining the earth's temperature.

The existence of such glaring omissions is nothing new — true climate scientists have known about and criticized them for years. Among them, Forbes says, is "the abrasive and brilliant MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen." But "rather than address Lindzen's critiques of their models, the climatology community has stopped inviting him to their conferences."

Which sounds a lot like the U.N. treaty conferees.

Someone else unlikely to make their guest list is a duo who published an article in the latest issue of the journal Science.

Their findings show that El Niño actually counters the buildup of so-called "greenhouse gases," tempering any supposed trend toward "global warming."

The scientists say El Niño causes a burst of plant growth throughout the world, and that slows the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Natural weather events, such as the brief warming caused by El Niño, have a much more dramatic effect than previously believed on how much carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants and how much of the gas is expelled by the soils, said David Schimel of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-author of the study.

Those determining how much to reduce fossil-fuel burning and the creation of carbon dioxide, said Schimel, should consider effects of natural climate variability on the ability of plants to absorb CO2.

Schimel said satellite measurements of CO2, plant growth and temperature show that natural warming events such as El Niño at first cause more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, probably as the result of accelerated decay of dead plant matter in the soil.

But later, within two years, there is a rapid growth in forests and grasslands, causing plants to more vigorously suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What the study shows is that the rise and fall of CO2 in the atmosphere is strongly influenced by natural changes in global temperature, said B.H. Braswell of the University of New Hampshire, a co-author of the study.

In essence, "global warming" is self-limiting.

"I think we have demonstrated that the ecosystem has a lot more to do with climate change than was previously believed," said Braswell.

The longer the debate goes on, the less the public seems to believe in global warming, and Americans are the leading doubters.

A poll surveying environmental attitudes in 24 countries suggests Americans are the most skeptical of the need for drastic and potentially costly steps to minimize climate change.

Could that be because relatively affluent Americans recognize they have the most to lose in terms of hampered lifestyles? Not according to other findings in the poll.

The survey generally found sharp differences between wealthy and poorer nations, with attitues in the latter tending to resemble those of Americans. Western Europeans, for example, said environmental protection should take precedence over economic growth, while most Eastern Europeans disagreed.