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PLAN by the White House to play down the threat of global warming collapsed
last week when European ministers refused to play along. After a two-day
conference in Washington DC, delegates from Europe and the US drafted separate
statements on what to do about greenhouse gases. Europe’s call for immediate
cuts in pollutants, especially carbon dioxide, while the American statement
emphasised the need for more research before such action is taken.

President Bush had intended to convince the delegations and the public
that the US is taking ‘environmentally responsible actions’. Instead, he
ended the conference on a defensive note, denying that the US has stressed
scientific uncertainty about climate change merely to postpone costly environmental
cleanups.

The occasion was the much-publicised White House Conference on Science
& Economics Research Related to Global Change. The US invited 17 nations
to send ministers for science, environment and economics to discuss ways
for ‘enhancing and broadening international understanding of the science
and economics research’ demanded by global climate change, according to
a ‘charter for cooperation’ offered by the US delegation.

But a set of confidential ‘talking points’ distributed to the US delegates
before the conference defined the conference’s goals differently. Under
the heading ‘debates to avoid’, the document stated that it was ‘not beneficial
to discuss whether there is or is not warming or how much or how little
warming. In the eyes of the public, we will lose this debate. A better approach
is to raise the many uncertainties that need to be better understood on
this issue.’

In his welcoming speech to the delegates, the President explained that
the meeting was meant to help ‘sort out the science’ and to link scientific
research with analysis of the economic costs. Å®ÉúСÊÓƵs are not agreed
that global warming has been caused by humans or that the phenomenon will
continue to worsen, Bush said. He argued that economic growth should not
be sacrificed in a rush to combat a warming of the Earth that might never
happen.

Allan Bromley, Bush’s science adviser, enumerated some of the ‘uncertainties’.
He noted that Britain’s Meteorological Office has found that adding the
effect of clouds to models of atmospheric warming diminishes the expected
warming trend. He also cited a paper in Science by scientists in Alabama
showing that temperatures of the atmosphere can be measured by satellites
to within 0.01Degree C. The paper showed that from 1979 to 1988, no warming
trend could be found. While a 10-year measurement is too brief to disprove
global warming, said Bromley, the findings show that all previous measurements
of atmospheric temperature are ‘obsolete’ when compared to the readings
that can now be taken by satellites.

Within hours of the conference’s opening, the West German delegation
issued its own statement. It noted that ‘existing gaps in our present knowledge
must in no way be misused as an excuse for global inertia’. Klaus Topfer,
West Germany’s minister for the environment, said he planned to propose
a 25 per cent reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide in his country by
2005. Topfer also suggested a levy on makers of chlorofluorocarbons, which
contribute to global warming.

Pier Vellinga, director of the Dutch programme on climate, said his
government wrote to the White House asking to change the agenda to include
public discussion of international action to freeze or reduce CO₂
emissions from fossil fuels. ‘We have had no reply,’ he said. ‘We now see
that it is a kind of one-way traffic.’

The US delegation opened the first day’s private workshops by presented
its charter for cooperation. It outlined a detailed plan for international
research and for forging a link between environmental science and economic
impacts of cutting emissions. Foreign delegates were surprised by it, according
to Padraig Flynn, minister for the environment for the EC’s European Council.
Said Flynn: ‘I raised the question . . . with William Reilly (administrator
of the US Environmental Protection Agency) as to what was the nature and
status of that document. And I quote you his exact words: ‘The document
is withdrawn and disavowed.’ ‘

White House officials hastily appended a handwritten note to the charter
before it was released to the public. The note stated that the charter consisted
of ‘suggestions’, and that ‘it is not intended that they would be discussed
any further in working groups’.

According to Laurens Jan Brinkhorst, director general for environment
for the European Commission, the working groups shifted the debate to immediate
action. Also, he said, it was very clear that the developing countries ‘will
not play ball’ if the developed countries do not contribute.

In their concluding remarks, the European delegations wrote that a response
to global warming ‘should be made without further delay, irrespective of
remaining uncertainties on some scientific aspects of the greenhouse effect’.
Bush agreed in his concluding speech that ‘research is no substitute for
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In closing the conference, however, Michael DeLand, chairman of Bush’s
Council on Environmental Quality, reminded participants once again of the
uncertainties, and that ‘so many scientific questions remain yet to be answered’.