Coping with climate change

WASHINGTON, DC — The Bush administration, in conjunction with thirteen sponsoring federal agencies, last Thursday completed a three-day workshop seeking to set a new agenda for research on climate change. Though hampered by an early season snowstorm on its final day, the meeting was host to nearly 1300 climate scientists, technologists and stakeholders. Faced with criticism for their environmental policy, administration officials and policy advisors emphasized the openness of the proceedings. Transparency was an "essential feature" of the meeting, said James R. Mahoney, assistant secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere and director of the US Climate Change Science Program. "The only way we could progress was to put it all on the table," he said.The proceedings focused on revisions and improvements to a draft version of a new strategic plan for US-sponsored climate change research. Mahoney told participants that the draft plan was prepared with an emphasis on the questions to be resolved in order to "develop effective public decisions about climate change." Mahoney resisted the idea of the workshop as a "rubber stamp," and the notion that it was part of a plan by the administration to delay dealing with global climate change. "We can't talk about implementation unless we do what we're doing here," Mahoney told reporters. "It's been years since there's been this kind of vetting of what we're really studying." The President has called for 10 years of research and voluntary global warming reduction measures before any strict regulations are put in place. According to Mahoney, this should not be considered a moratorium; the administration could conceivably change its "goals and tactics." Bush has thus far rejected the Kyoto Protocol, which has been accepted by most other industrialized countries. It requires a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2012 to levels below those measured in 1990. "We know the surface temperature of the Earth is rising, and we know that the changes are [partly] due to humans," Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd-Whitman told a workshop audience of scientists, stakeholders and media. "But we can't rule out changes due to natural variability. We need to know which human activities are causing the greatest climate change." The US Global Change Research Program was launched as a series of research initiatives in 1987 and signed into law in 1990. To date, more than $20 billion of research funding has supported the USGCRP. Much of the discussion at the recent meeting was based on a 2001 National Research Council report commissioned by the Bush administration.Mahoney told reporters that one major challenge would be moving much of the funded science toward "policy-related" research while not neglecting the need for basic research on climate change. The 24-session workshop included discussions of "climate variability and change," "interactions between data, observations, and modeling," and "human contributions and responses to climate change." Aims endorsed at the workshop included improved protocols for global measurements, data management and trend analysis, evaluation of technologies for mitigation of warming effects, and the monitoring consequences of global change for ecosystems. A session titled "ecosystem interactions," for example, stressed the need for more emphasis in the draft report on rates of climate change, more explicit attention to species changes, and a better integration of report chapters on ecosystems with chapters on the effects of human contributions to climate change.Feedback from the workshop, along with additional written and online comments, will be accepted until January 13, 2003. The final version of the strategic plan, which will guide the federal research program during the next several years, is scheduled to be released in April of 2003.

Coping with climate change

Workshop seeks to set US global warming research agenda

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