But at least the process had been kept alive; the remaining details would be worked out at the next round of talks in Buenos Aires in October.  Gore had not betrayed the cause after all. The  7% cut was his idea, and even the decision to come had been taken against the advice of his staff.  Three cheers for mankind, I said to Wren Wirth. 

       Back at his office in Washington, Phil Clapp offered his post-game analysis : “The U.S. negotiating  team started delivering on some central things. The Europeans and Japanese wanted market-based mechanisms. The Europeans were pushing for a 33% limit on trading outside your own country, the U.S. wanted 50%. We still have to define trading. The real reduction number for the U.S. will be  more like 2-3%. It will be influenced by how sinks are defined. The language is ambiguous. It has to be worked on in Buenos Aires. It is not the Kyoto protocol, but the Buenos Aires protocol that will go to the Senate for ratificiation, and it will look substantially different.”

         When will it be submitted ? I asked. “After the president signs the treaty (he has up to March of 99 to do), there is  no deadline for  when the Senate has to ratify it.. Say Clinton signs right after Buenos Aires. There is an. automatic one-year delay during which the State Department goes over the treaty to make sure there is no conflict in protocol with U.S. law and that U.S. law contains sufficient statutory authority to implement it.  If doesn’t  already have it, the treaty will be sent to the Senate  accompanied by proposed legislation. Says it goes to the Senate in November ‘99. They could argue about it interminably. There are still some international  treaties from the Reagan era sitting in the Foreign Relations Committee.”

        Yipes, I said. You mean the treaty has to get past Jesse Helms ?

      “You better believe it,” Clapp said. “So to answer your question, if the treaty is going to be ratified— and that’s a big if— it is not going to happen before this year’s congressional elections and maybe not until after Clinton leaves office. It won’t happen until 2000 at the earliest. Then, to go into effect, it has to be ratified by at least 55 countries who are collectively responsible for at least 55% of the emissions.

       “But the president has pledged to already proceed with legislation for domestic reductions,” he reassured me, “such as  a utility restructuring bill that includes carbon dioxide-reduction measures,  and stronger standards of energy efficiency for newly manufactured appliances,  which he and the Department of Energy have the authority to do under the l987 and l992 energy-cut laws. So the United States can make significant reductions even while the treaty is being shaped and ratified. The hard stuff for Gore politically has been done. What remains is to make the treaty less objectionable to industry.  Gore came and did what he had to do and he did it against the advise of virtually all his advisers, and that’s courage.” 

       Of course there was hollering from the expected quarters. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican who was one of the congressional observors, declared, “Anyway you measure this, this is a very bad deal for America.”. William O’ Keefe,  chairman of the Global Climate Coalition, said the treaty gave “ an international body control over our economic well-being” and compared it to unilateral disarmament, and  Gingrich himself said  the United States “surrendered” to pressure in Kyoto. “It is profoundly wrong that 134 countries were allowed to vote on a treaty by which they will not be bound,” he complained. Heavy industry from cars to coal to steel to electricity were already joining with organized labor to fight the proposal. A big battle looms in the Senate. Even John Kerry pronounced the treaty “dead on arrival. What we have here is not ratifiable in the Senate in my judgment” because of the failure to get guarantees from the developing countries. More millions of dollars will be spend on lobbying and advertising. Already the power lobby has been putting out scare figures : 3 million American will be sent to the  unemployment line in the first 10 years,  energy costs and consumer prices will be driven up,   at least $10 billion will be drained  from the U.S. economy. At this point,  at least 20 senators are unlikely to sign the treaty under any circumstances. Newt and co hope to bury  it as they did health care.

      From the other side were statements from environmental groups like the World Wildlife 
Fund, which characterized the treaty as  “a flawed agreement that will allow major polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases through loopholes.” 

       The president had this to say to his Republican critics : “I see already the papers are full of people saying, ‘The sky is falling, the sky is falling, it’s a terrible thing.’ Every time we’ve tried to improve the American environment in the last 25 or 30 years, somebody has predicted that it would wreck the economy. And the air is cleaner, the food supply is safer, there are fewer toxic waste dumps. And the last time I checked, we had the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years.” Without waiting for ratification, Clinton included in his budget and State of the Union message specific proposals for $5 billion in tax incentives and research to promote energy efficiency.

      Winning the Senate’s consent to the treaty will be his overriding environmental task this year...   To comply with a 7% cut we will need more efficient cars, which account for one third of our emissions, and this is already happening. In response to anticipated competition, Ford has announced that its SUVs will be 40% cleaner in l998 at an extra cost of only $100 per vehicle, and that it is investing $420 million in developing with a German car manufacturer and a Canadian alternative-energy company a fuel cell car whose exhaust will be water and little else, and General Motors, having fiercely but unsuccessfully opposed the treaty, has unveiled prototypes of several mid-size cars that will get up to 60 or 80 per gallon.  Global warming may still be a hypothesis, but it is encouraging when even the c.e.o. of Ford says, “When you double the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, something has to happen.”

***

       The problem with gaining acceptance for global warming is not only conservative politics and business interests, but that there is still a lot of what scientists call “noise,” incomplete and contradictory information.  Are we  in an interglacial warm phase,  or have we begun to enter the next ice age (this was the big scare twenty years ago, but the theory has few adherents today) , but the cooling is being overridden by human amplification of the greenhouse effect ? Are we in a climatic optimum (a period of warmth) or a pessimum (a cold spell), and what governs these cycles ? The Farmer’s Almanac, which  has as good a track record about the weather as the  computer-generated g.c.m.’s (general circulation models) modern forecasters rely on, is predicting a cold, wet 21st century. Because of a natural cycle that comes every 720 years, the almanac claims, we’re due to return to the Little Ice Age of the 1280s. But Gerald Bond of the Lamont-Dougherty lab has radio-carbon dated grains of sand in ocean corings and found evidence of cold spells occurring regularly over the last 32,000 years, every 1,400 to 1,500 years.

      Is the warming we’re currently experiencing just a temporary blip ? What is the role of sunspots (which periodically flare up and increase the intensity of the sun’s energy), of fluctuations in the earth’s orbit (which some think played a role in triggering previous ice ages) ? To what extent are sulfate aerosols, another byproduct of burning  coal, masking the effects of warming ? Have the past  eight thousand years been remarkably stable climatically, as Wallace Broecker maintains, or have there in fact been, as his colleague name tk argues, proonged  droughts and other extreme events severe enough to  disrupt human civilization, like the 25 year- drought that drove the Anasazi from their cliff dwellings in Arizona at the end of the 13th century ? Are the extreme weather events that seem to be increasing in severity and frequency “stochastic,” random visitations still within the realm of natural variability, or are they “anthropogenic,” caused by human mucking up of the global weather engine ? What is the role of water vapor, by far the most powerful of the greenhouse gases, and cloud cover ? (According to Sir Robert May, “the effect of cloud cover seems to be very variable, depending on local conditions and the kind of cloud. Clouds reflect some solar radiation back to space, so reducing the global warming effect. However, they counter this by acting as a blanket for thermal radiation from the earth’s surface, thus increasing average temperatures. Which of the two effects dominates depends on cloud temperature, height, and optical properties [whether it is ice or water, thick or thin]. In general, low clouds cool global climate, whereas high clouds tend to increase temperatures.”)

       A small but vocal group of  scientists rejects the entire hypothesis that an increase in carbon dioxide from human activities is warming the planet. George Woodwell calls them “tobacco scientists,” because most of them have consulted for the petroleum industry. The most respectable and “statured”  of these naysayers  is  Richard Lindzen, an M.I.T professor who studies theoretical climatology and the physics of weather.  Lindzen admits to having taken travel money from a consortium called Western Fuels so he could testify at a Senate hearing on global warming chaired by Al Gore, but he assured me his motive for challenging the prevailing wisdom of his peers about there being a “discernible human influence” on  global climate is purely that there are still a lot of unanswered questions. “I got into this in l988 because the newspapers were saying ‘all scientists agree’ and I knew many of my colleagues were intimidated by public perception and peer pressure. No one who was young in the field dared speak out. They wouldn’t have been published. So I felt it was essential for someone who was tenured like me to ask questions. We’ve spent billions and the l995 report is vastly less certain than the l990 one.” 

      “He’s a colorful guy,” Mark Cane told me. “If he gets people mad, maybe there’s something to what he’s saying.” It was obvious, after talking with him for more than an hour on the phone, that Lindzen enjoyed playing the gadfly, the contrarian. I sensed that I could have gotten him going and suddenly injected, “but of course you don’t dispute the fact  that the earth revolves around the sun,” and he would have found some reason for taking exception to the statement.   Lindzen’s politics seem  welll to the right of Attila the Hun’s. He claims the Russian Revolution had far more impact on civilization than the direst global warming scenario ever would.

       According to Ross Gelbspan, the author of The Heat Is On, a recent book that lays out the science and the controversy still swirling around global warming,  Lindzen arrived at his belief that global warming is basically a nonevent partly from his own studies of atmospheric water vapor.

       Some years ago Linden theorized that atmospheric convection currents would transport water vapor through certain cloud formations into the upper atmosphere. There it would be dried out, in effect, imposing an upper limit on the vapor buildup that would otherwise have fueled atmospheric warming. Fears of a runaway greenhouse reaction, he concluded, were unfounded. After satellite and balloon observations disproved the theory that the drying of upper level water vapor would produce a cooling effect and counteract atmospheric warming, he retracted it in l991. But in l995 he was saying again that greenhouse warming would not occur because of the cooling effect of water vapor, and he attacked the then head of the IPPC, John Houghton, who had drafted the “discernible human influence global” statement and gotten the panel’s 2000 scientists to endorse it, for being  “motivated by a religious need to oppose materialism.” 

       Lindzen pointed out that the climate models had predicted that an increase of 80 parts per million of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last hundred years would cause an increase in the world’s temperature of 2.7 degrees Celsius, when in fact, it only rose only .9 degrees, and there was virtually no warming for the United States, less than a half degree.  “What does that tell you ?” he asked.  “I’m saying the last century is within natural variability, and if you double the CO2 you’re only going to get a half of a degree rise more. C02, you see, is not as important in the greenhouse effect as water vapor. A 4 to 8% rise in relative humidity, which  can happen in a few hours, equals a doubling of C02. But the physics of water vapor is complex. The models assume feedbacks from water vapor  amplifying warming but the physics says water vapor is what’s left over after rain, and every textbook says the efficiency of precipitation goes up with temperature.”

       What about the increase in extreme events ? “There isn’t any,” Lindzen retorted. “The National Climatic Center has been publishing monthly bulletins of severe weather in the U.S. for the last thirty years. You can pick up any month in l962 and find these strange events. If there are any fluctuations, it’s because there was a different editor.”

            The National Climatic Center in Asheville, North Carolina has the hardest data— detailed temperature and precipitation records for the whole world, some going back three hundred years. Dr. David Easterling, one of NCC’s climatologists, told me that Lindzen was correct :  in the last century the world has warmed about .9 degrees, and the United States less than half a degree. This doesn’t seem much, but the average rise in the last ten thousand years has only been 1.8 degrees every thousand years, and at this rate, at the end of the next century, when doubling is expected to be reached, it will be 2.6 degrees warmer— a rise that would cause major disruptions.  “We’ve also been looking at how hot it gets in the day, and how cool at night. The days haven’t been getting significantly hotter, but at night since l950 for most of the world it has become 1.8 degrees warmer. That’s a lot for the night.” Many proponents of global warming point to this second finding as one of the most  dramatic “smoking guns.”  The mid-July heat-wave that killed more than 560 people in Chicago in l995 was so deadly because the temperature, which reached 106,  hardly went down at night. “There was so much moisture in the air, it wasn’t able to cool down,” Easterling explained.

       As for the monthly bulletin of extreme weather events, Easterling said it was too anecdotal to draw conclusions from. 

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