Washington

Margot Oneill

US lukewarm on greenhouse studies

THE United States continues to disappoint the international community with its halting response to the global warming crisis.

A new environmental ‘action agenda’ recently unveiled by the White House projects that US emissions of carbon dioxide will increase 15 per cent by the turn of the century at a time when many nations, including Australia and New Zealand, are curbing such emissions.

Carbon dioxide is the principal warming gas causing the greenhouse effect. The United States is responsible for one quarter of world emissions of carbon dioxide.

The US plan was announced before more than 500 delegates from over 100 nations including the South Pacific who gathered in Virginia in February to discuss the drafting of the first United Nations convention to fight global warming. The conference was the first to seek formal UN sponsored remedies to the greenhouse effect after a meeting in Geneva last November accepted the results of the most intensive scientific study of the looming crisis.

An international panel concluded that heat-trapping gases from industry and farming will raise world temperatures by two degrees by the year 2025 and six degrees by 2100. The consequences could be devastating especially for some South Pacific island nations, including the Cook Islands, Tuvalu and Kiribati, which may disappear under rising tides.

The White House has refused to accept the certainty of global warming even though many American scientists have been instrumental in identifying the greenhouse effect.

New research by one of those scientists, James Hansen of NASA’s Goodard Space Institute, concluded that 1990 was the warmest year in recorded history and that the class of the 1980 s included the seven warmest years for some than 100 years. US officials point to contradictory studies such as a report by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Institute and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which says there is no trend in global warming. Their findings show that 1990 was only the fourth-warmest year in the last 12 years.

Marshall/Alabama scientists claim the Hansen climate

record was confined to land, leaving out the 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface covered by water. Thus, unprecedented heat in the northern hemisphere was olf-set by survey results of the southern hemisphere where there is mainly ocean.

Before the Virginia conference opened, 21 American scientists sent a letter to President George Bush, telling him that the impact of future climatic change is likely to be much less severe than generally expected, perhaps even neutral or beneficial.

The US plan announced at the Virginia conference promises to stabilise the emission of warming gases mainly by passing out chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs and was hailed by some delegates who provided a shift in the US position toward at least some precautionary action.

The chairman of the White House Council on Environ mental Quality, Michael Deland, explained that “despite large uncertainties, the potential threat of climate change

justifies taking action.”

But critics say the US should acknowledge that the majority of scientists accept the global warming trend. The critics accuse the US of recycling old programs it was already committed to, such as the phasing out of CFG while ignoring the vital issue of carbon dioxide emissions.

The Alliance of Small Island States, formed at the Geneva meeting last November and chaired by Vanuatu’s represen tative to the United Nations, Robert van Lierop, called for immediate and significant cuts in the emissions from industrialised countries of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The alliance said small island states “will be the first victims (ofglobal warming). Indeed there is already evidence to suggest that the coral bleaching of their corals may be due to climate changes which have already taken place”.

The international political director of Greenpeace Atmos phere and Energy Campaign, Paul Hohnen, a former Australian diplomat, said the robust stance of the South Pacific Forum on the greenhouse effect had set an important example for other developing nations.

Last year the Forum called for industrialised nations to cut their emissions of warming gases such as carbon dioxide.

Australia and New Zealand have set targets and timetables to reduce their outputs as have European nations.

But the US was “failing in its leadership responsibility” especially since it is “responsible for the largest greenhouse gas emissions and has the technological ability to take industry in new directions,” Hohnen said.

He also pointed out that the conference in Virginia opened on the hottest day on record. □