out of the blue

It looks like the Bush administration has finally admitted that global warming might actually be a real problem:

In a grim and powerful assessment of the future of the planet, the leading international network of climate scientists has concluded for the first time that global warming is “unequivocal” and that human activity is the main driver, “very likely” causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950.

In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, said the confidence level for its projections was “likely,” or 66 to 90 percent. That level has now been raised to “very likely,” better than 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.

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The Bush administration, which until recently avoided directly accepting that humans were warming the planet in potentially harmful ways, embraced the findings, which had been approved by representatives from the United States and 112 other countries on Thursday night.

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At the same time, Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman rejected the idea of unilateral limits on emissions. "We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world, so it’s really got to be a global solution," he said.

The United States, with about 5 percent of the world’s population, contributes about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions, more than any other country.

What astonishes me is how bloody long it took for them to accept that. Scientists have been getting surer and surer, and among most reputable scientists there has been a consensus for a few years now. But the attitude of the Bush administration has been "We have some scientists who doubt these theories, so we're not even going to consider them." It was easier to plug their ears and loudly hum than to actually pursue a legitimate investigation into the veracity of such theories.

Now that we're past that particular hurdle, now that it has become so overwhelmingly obvious that even they cannot ignore it, I wonder what they are going to do about it.

The following day, Charles Stross (a brilliant fellow by all accounts) posts an article noting that "The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank largely funded by Exxon-Mobil is offering to pay climatologists $10,000 for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)." This will, of course, mortally wound those scientists' reputations. Stross notes that $10,000 isn't quite enough to forever put you out of a reputable job.

I'm a little confused about the tendency for nations to abhor unilateral restraints. It seems to me that they are an excellent way to gain the moral high ground (that America has entirely lost by now) and to actually push for true change. "See, we're doing it, now you should too." I understand that in this sort of game theory dilemma it is the ideal (purely profit-motivated) situation for everyone to limit their emissions except you, but it doesn't accomplish the goal: The goal isn't to "win" in some technical economic sense, but to keep intact the valuable resource we have in the natural world. It seems to me that the best way to do that is to simply start changing, and expect the rest of the world to follow in our footsteps. The reason the Kyoto Protocol largely failed is that the United States wouldn't accept such limits. The result? The world was set back a good ten or twenty years in that particular branch of environmental protection. Are such economic imbalances simply not feasible? Would it put our already shaky economy on even less stable grounds? I don't know. But I bet we could afford it if we really cared. Let's hope that the other 112 nations that approved the study will be willing to be reasonable about emissions and that change can be effected quickly. I wonder how likely that is….