The science is clear; the earth's climate is warming and human activities are responsible for much of it. That was the message driven home at a seminar at the Fletcher School on Tuesday entitled "Stop Global Waffling: The Importance of Action at the Upcoming Climate Change Negotiations. " During the program, a number of experts discussed the roadblocks standing in the way of multilateral action to reduce global warming.
With the politically tumultuous US presidential elections as a backdrop, the international community will meet in the Netherlands next month to try to shore up the Kyoto Protocol - an global agreement to curb global warming - and discuss the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many countries signed the protocol, including the US, but it has not gone into effect because few countries ratified it.
The issue is especially important at Tufts, where a program called Tufts Climate Initiative is engaged in efforts to demonstrate the feasibility of the Kyoto Protocol. The University is complying with its self-proclaimed mandates by cutting Tufts' emissions and increasing energy efficiency on all of its campuses. Additionally, student interest in the environmental issues is high, and several students will travel to The Hague for the November conference.
It will take more than just Tufts, however, to solve the world's climate problems. The Hague meeting will be tasked with hammering out the most difficult issues amidst a turbulent political environment, and the experts who spoke at Tufts on Wednesday expressed concern about the prospects of the negotiations.
Kelly Sims, a doctoral candidate at Fletcher and formerly the science policy director of Ozone Action in Washington, DC, said that she is amazed at the progress made by scientists in understanding the complicated climate cycles. But, she is concerned that the political process will not be fruitful.
Sims said that the US has not taken steps to comply with the modest seven percent emissions cuts required by the Protocol, and that other nations are asking themselves if the US is "just trying to weasel out of its commitments."
"I am really worried that we are still in an exceedingly political stage... too political to put together a coherent, rational international regime," she said.
According to Sims, the US presidential election poses a further challenge to The Hague negotiations. The world community will meet at The Hague right after the elections, and the winner may well determine the fate of the Protocol. Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush opposes the Kyoto agreement and has said that he does not believe there is conclusive evidence that humans are to blame for global warming. Al Gore supports the treaty but has not yet taken a leadership role on the issue.
The rhetoric of the presidential campaign, combined with a Congress that has been staunchly reluctant to ratify the Protocol, means that it will be very difficult for the US to lead the world on combating global warming. "US domestic politics has hijacked the process," Sims said.
Despite her skepticism, Sims is hopeful that some action will be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide and methane. She said she is encouraged by the fact that 200 student activists, including some from Tufts, are going to attend the negotiations at the Hague.
A consistent theme throughout the discussion was the lack of public interest and knowledge about global warming. The panelists said that public ignorance and apathy is due in large part to the concerted efforts by industrial interests to distort scientific findings and make people believe that not enough is known to warrant any actions.
One scientist who has been on the front lines of the global warming "debate" and has seen firsthand how his work is sometimes distorted for political purposes is Harvard Biological Oceanography Professor James McCarthy. McCarthy is the co-chair of Working Group Two of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most extensive and authoritative source on climate change.
McCarthy said there is no scientific doubt that the climate is changing, nor is there doubt over why it is changing. The remaining scientific debate is over how much it will change and exactly how that change will be manifested.
The perception that the science is still uncertain bothers McCarthy. "I am always surprised at how effective a handful of people are in convincing the public that there are serious doubts that the climate is changing," he said. According to McCarthy, the small number of skeptics are "a bunch of pointy heads with an agenda... they are not in the mainstream of science."
Although the science of global warming paints a bleak picture, and the political climate is stagnated, there is hope that something can be done to alleviate the problem. Adam Markham, formerly the director of the World Wildlife Foundation's international climate campaign and now the executive director of a new charity called Clean Air-Cool Planet, encouraged those in the audience to work for change.
Markham, a zoologist by training, touched on issues raised by McCarthy raised and said that scientists are actually at a disadvantage in the media because of the way their research is criticized. "We have to defend everything we say (based on) peer-reviewed literature, while the critics can say anything they want."
The message of the scientists has yet to seep into the minds of the public, Markham said, and the political actors have not moved on the issue.
Markham has taken his personal message to New England where he works to spread the ominous gospel of global warming. Like the Tufts Climate Initiative, he is determined to prove that there are things that can be done to help stop global warming and demonstrate to Washington that the necessary measures will not endanger the economy.
The efforts of Markham's group are concentrated on getting businesses and residents of the Northeastern states to be more energy efficient and more active in demanding that the government take action.
"We have to find ways to engage people in the climate change issue," he said. "Getting ordinary people interested in this issue is the biggest challenge."
