THE mood music has certainly changed. A report for the US Congress describing the activities and plans for the national Climate Change Science Program () states in clear terms that increases in global temperature over the past 50 years are 鈥渦nlikely to be due only to natural climate variations鈥�. And it lays the blame for some of the warming on greenhouse gases (see 鈥淏ush鈥檚 U-turn鈥�).
Until now, the Bush administration has gone out of its way to distance itself from statements about human-induced climate change. President Bush dismissed a 2002 report by the State Department which predicted dire consequences from global warming, saying it had been 鈥減ut out by the bureaucracy鈥�. The same year, the Environmental Protection Agency dropped global warming completely from its annual report on air pollution. But the latest report is endorsed by none other than Donald Evans and Spencer Abraham, the secretaries of commerce and energy respectively, and by John Marburger, Bush鈥檚 science adviser.
So has there been a change in policy? The Bush administration has never denied the existence of global warming. Rather, it has argued that we do not know enough about the causes to set sensible policy. The admission that humans have something to do with driving climate change seems like a significant shift. But until the administration creates legally binding rules to curb greenhouse gas emissions, such change is meaningless.
Advertisement