President Bush Forgets About Global Warming
Feb. 1, 2006 — -- President Bush may have broken some ground when he admitted in his State of the Union speech that the country is "addicted to oil," but he did not mention the other massive issue that's tied to oil ... global warming.
The vast majority of scientists now agree that global warming is real and well under way.
"It may have sounded new to some, but it wasn't -- there was nothing really new there," says American economist Gary Yohe, who has focused for years on the economic challenges and dangers posed by global warming. "As long as they remain voluntary, meaningful cuts in greenhouse gas emissions simply won't happen in the U.S."
An extremely gloomy assessment of the dangers of global warming was published this week in Britain by prominent Earth systems scientist James Lovelock. In "Gaias's Revenge," Lovelock concludes that catastrophic global warming cannot be avoided; Lovelock does not expect that the United States, China or India will make the necessary emissions cuts over the next few years to avoid catastrophic global warming, and he expects it will occur soon.
Before the end of the century, says Lovelock, too many climate system tipping points will have passed, taking the planet into a runaway greenhouse effect that will raise temperatures so sharply that people will be "dying by the billions" with only a "few breeding pairs left" at the poles, the only places that will be at all tolerable.
Leading American climate scientist James Hansen of NASA says there is still time, that planetary catastrophe can be avoided, "but we have to get started with the emissions cuts now ... [get them] well under way within the next 10 years."
While virtually all climate scientists agree new emissions-free energy technologies are vital if there is to be any chance of averting drastically disruptive climate change, many say that even the most promising new technologies would take years to become effective, and they argue that in the meantime there must be major cuts in greenhouse emissions.
"There is some new money in the Advanced Energy Initiative that President Bush announced last night, but it pales in comparison to the tax breaks he's offering the oil companies," says Susan Joy Hassol, an independent climate analyst who has written several major international assessments of global climate change.
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