But while the report says the United States will be substantially changed in the next few decades — "very likely" seeing the disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes, for example — it does not propose any major shift in the administration's policy on greenhouse gases.It recommends adapting to inevitable changes. It does not recommend making rapid reductions in greenhouse gases to limit warming, the approach favored by many environmental groups and countries that have accepted the Kyoto Protocol, a climate treaty written in the Clinton administration that was rejected by Mr. Bush.
The new document, "U.S. Climate Action Report 2002," strongly concludes that no matter what is done to cut emissions in the future, nothing can be done about the environmental consequences of several decades' worth of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases already in the atmosphere.
Its emphasis on adapting to the inevitable fits in neatly with the climate plan Mr. Bush announced in February. He called for voluntary measures that would allow gas emissions to continue to rise, with the goal of slowing the rate of growth.
Chapter 6: Impacts and Adaptation The discussion of impacts of climate change in this chapter is based on the U.S. National Assessment in the 2000 NAST Report. This report remains highly controversial, and was, at that time, the subject of considerable debate with regard to it scientific and policy discussions. The most contentious aspects of the report were (1) the use of the most pessimistic projects of potential climate impacts, with little or no discussion of the uncertainties involved in such projections; and (2) the use of global climate models to predict impacts on regional climates within the U.S. Global climate models cannot be used to project changes in regional climate, primarily because of insufficient spatial resolution and their inability to represent regional phenomena such as clouds. As was pointed out when the National Assessment was in review, the regional projections from the two climate models used often provide diametrically opposed projects for regional climate, making it impossible to determine which (or either) is (are) correct. Further, attempts to average the results from the two models are also without scientific basis. Thank you for your attention to these comments. Please contact Peg Gutmann at 313-594-0400 if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
W. M. Kreucher
There is actually a fair bit of scientific debate on whether or not global warming is occuring, and if so, what the effects would be. One model has more water evaporating from equatorial regions, leading to more clouds, which would reflect some of the sun's energy back into space, which would cool everything back off....
I'm not convinced it's happening yet.