Bush scorns environmental responsibility

It is a quite remarkable irony that the scientific data giving the world what may be its most ominous warning yet about the onset of climate change should be coming from the country that produces the largest amount of greenhouse gases, yet whose present government barely acknowledges that there is a problem.

Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO{-2}), the principal greenhouse gas, have made a sudden leap that cannot be adequately explained by terrestrial emissions from factories and motor vehicles. This may be merely an anomalous rise, but, on the other hand, it may signify much more than that, and mark the beginning of a "feedback" effect, in which the Earth's forests and oceans start to lose their ability to absorb large amounts of carbon, and thus remove it from the atmosphere. Should this prove true, the timetable for the advent of climate change and its catastrophic consequences could be very much shorter than anyone at present imagines.

The data that enables the world to perceive this danger are the continuous readings of atmospheric CO{-2} levels made from the U.S. observatory on the top Mauna Loa, a volcano in Hawaii, since 1958. They are processed by two prestigious centers of scientific excellence: the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California at San Diego, and the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

This is an entirely praiseworthy piece of entirely American science: No other country has done anything like it for anything like as long. It is the world's clearest picture of the greenhouse gas threat, and it is the very length of the data time-series that allows the present anomaly in the figures to stand out so clearly.

So how on Earth, we find ourselves asking, can the United States simultaneously lead the world in the science of climate change, in the warnings of its dangers and in the obstruction of efforts to find a solution to it? Yet merely to pose the question is to realize at once just how far George W. Bush and his cabal have turned their backs on reality in withdrawing the United States from the Kyoto protocol and the international consensus on the need to take decisive action to deal with global warming.

The United States is, of course, not the only guilty party. India and China have increased emissions massively in recent years as their economies have expanded. But, as the world's pre-eminent political and industrial power, the United States has a duty to take a lead. It is a duty that President Bush has scorned.

Never mind Iraq. History will judge Bush very harshly over climate change, especially if he is re-elected next month and continues his obstruction for another four years. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to his great credit, fully recognizes the climate danger, and has promised to make it, with the condition of Africa, one of the twin themes of Britain's forthcoming presidency of the G8. If he is to make any progress, he will sooner or later have to confront head-on the Bush administration's state of denial over global warming, and to call it publicly what it is, special relationship or no special relationship.

The Independent is published in Britain.

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