By Mike Dunne
Forest Magazine, Spring 2007

In the North, shrinking sea ice threatens the very existence of polar bears.

In Alaska, 10 to 15 percent of the boreal forest was consumed by fire in a two–year period.

In the oceans, small rises in water temperature are threatening tiny organisms essential to the marine food chain.

And researchers now say 2006 was the hottest year on record, capping a multi–year run of record–setting temperatures.

Evidence of global warming has been mounting for years, but it has just recently begun to heat up the effort for the United States to come up with policies to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are blamed for warming up the Earth’s atmosphere.

What’s the major stumbling block?

“Two words: Bush administration,” says Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis for the Pew Climate Center on Global Climate Change. “Anything that messes with people’s profits and makes them think they are going to have to engineer things a different way than they are comfortable with [when] they have had success with it in the past, creates a constituency against change.”

Politics have, and will probably contineto have, a dampening effect on efforts to craft a response to global climate change.

Despite his assurances during the 2000 election campaign that he was in favor of regulating carbon dioxide emissions, George W. Bush withdrew official support of the Kyoto Protocol soon after taking office. The administration’s message, until recently, has been that human–induced global warming wasn’t verifiable and required no action.

A report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists in January illustrates some of the forces that have kept the administration from addressing—or acknowledging—the global warming crisis. The report claims that a decade ago ExxonMobil embarked on a disinformation campaign about global warming. Between 1998 and 2005, the company funneled nearly $16 million to advocacy groups to confuse the global warming issue. In 2001, according to the report, the oil conglomerate influenced Bush’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol. The report likened the disinformation campaign to the one tobacco companies engaged in years ago, which was intended to convince the public that smoking was not harmful to human health.

A December 2005 report from the group concluded that “The Bush administration has consistently sought to undermine the public’s understanding of the view held by the vast majority of climate scientists” that the problem is real and that humans are the cause. It also pointed out that “scientists who work for and advise the federal government have seen their work manipulated, suppressed, distorted, while agencies have systematically limited public and policy maker access to critical scientific information.”

There have been other allegations of the administration squelching scientists’ comments on the issue. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration public affairs staff was ordered to review future speeches and papers by James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a climate expert who ran afoul of the White House by calling for reductions in greenhouse gases in a 2005 lecture. George Deutsch, a Bush appointee in the NASA public affairs office, refused a request by National Public Radio to interview Hansen.

In early December, a union representing Environmental Protection Agency employees sent two congressional committees a petition saying administration officials were ignoring science and asking lawmakers to support a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The Bush administration has told EPA it has no business considering such regulations.

But despite the administration’s attempts to ignore, if not outright discredit, climate change science, the public is reaching its own conclusions.

Because of weather changes such as warming temperatures and disappearing sea ice, “people intuitively know something is happening,” says Arroyo of the Climate Center. But, she adds, it hasn’t yet jelled to the point where people are calling for policy change.

Arroyo and others hope to see an attitudinal shift now that Democrats control both the House of Representatives and the Senate. But there are two more years left in the Bush administration, and action on a national policy to address climate change will take time. “We see some final action in maybe 2009–2010,” she says.

Virginia Burkett, coordinator of global climate change science for the U.S. Geological Survey, says that as scientists find more evidence of climate change impacts and can better document them, policymakers will be more comfortable taking action. Both the public and policymakers “are seeing the changes in our lifetimes,” she says. “They can only be attributed to changes in the climate.”

Burkett, who is also on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sees movement from federal agencies—starting with the resurrection of her job in 2006 after it had remained vacant for several years—as recognition of the pressing need to face the issue. Also, the December proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list polar bears as “threatened” is another response that could herald a major policy shift.

In January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Deep inside the press release, the agency said a “contributing factor” might be “the long–term warming trend, which has been linked to increases in greenhouse gases.” The report marks the first time under the Bush administration that the agency has admitted the relationship.

Also in that month, eleven members of the U.S. Senate introduced a bill that calls for reductions in carbon dioxide and other heat–trapping emissions. The goal is to reach levels that are 80 percent below the 1990 levels by 2050.

The administration’s aversion to recognizing climate change has played a role in forest management, too. The Healthy Forests Initiative, adopted in 2002, doesn’t acknowledge climate change, but prescribes an aggressive thinning regime (see “Smoke Alarm,” p. 17) to address the growing number of large wildfires in the West and elsewhere.

But Sally Collins, associate chief of the Forest Service, says that while many may see the federal government’s leadership as denying or not worrying about climate change, the agency is beginning to incorporate the issue into its management plans.For instance, the Forest Service has devised a method for landowners to calculate the amount of carbon their trees can sequester, so they could sell carbon credits and generate income by not cutting trees, Collins says (see “Accounting for Carbon,” p. 5). By this fall, the process will be Web–based.

Climate change is also morphing policy on reforestation. “In the past, reforestation has been with native species, but we might have to look at more temperature–resistant trees,” she says. The agency is researching different methods of reforestation, she adds, including how planting new species would alter wildlife habitats.

Ann Bartuska, deputy chief for research and development for the Forest Service, says agency scientists are “coming up with prescriptions” for the potential negative effects of climate change, depending on regional circumstances. While some reforestation may involve planting new species, other efforts might call for replanting native species, such as reforesting longleaf pine in some of its historic range along the Gulf of Mexico and southern Atlantic coasts.

Translating science to policy might be difficult, but some local and regional leaders aren’t waiting for national direction. Mayors of more than 300 U.S. cities have signed an agreement pledging to reduce carbon dioxide pollution levels. California has taken a bold leadership role in placing limits on emissions of some greenhouse gases. In the northeastern United States, the nine–state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is working to reduce utility plant emissions of carbon dioxide.

The potential for more action may be easier now that the new IPCC report has been released, says Burkett of the Geological Survey. The report, issued in early February, may help reduce the confusion as science begins to document more changes, she says. The report’s chapter on observed changes cites about 400 published articles documenting ecosystem changes across the globe that can be attributed to climate change.

“[The] more confidence in the findings, the more confident policymakers will be in responding,” Burkett says.

Science, so disdained by some administration officials, may actually turn up the heat on policymakers to cap greenhouse gases and begin to reverse the warming trend.

Forest Magazine | FSEEE