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THE LAST THING reporters expect to get at a press briefing is news. And the printed agenda for last Thursday's "Impacts of Climate Change on the Pacific Northwest" workshop gave no reason to expect any. When they took their seats in the UW Faculty Club conference room, the dozen or so science writers invited to attend already knew that reputable scientists think the world is getting warmer, the Northwest along with it, and that there's going to be less winter snow in our mountains, which means less summer water for hydropower, irrigation, salmon, and people.
We also knew that, even while we listened to UW experts like statistician Ed Sarachik and physicist Phil Mote explain the climate models that yield those predictions, representatives of 150 nations were assembled in Marrakech, Morocco, to hammer out an agreement to slow, and ultimately halt, global warming, despite the Bush administration's shameful refusal to take part in the process.
Well, we thought we knew that. Then, as we chewed our way through the sandwiches and fruit salad provided for lunch, an international marine-law expert named Ed Miles rose and, smiling broadly, went to work to tell us that what we thought we knew about global warming was wrong.
Far from being a modest step forward for international cooperation to protect the environment, Miles said, agreement in Marrakech could accelerate environmental catastrophe. And the U.S. pullout from the Kyoto accord, though for all the wrong reasons, may prove to be a crucial first step back from the brink.
As if that weren't bad enough, Miles also got low-down and personal: We science writers were responsible for getting out the real story on climate and Kyoto to our readers, he said, and so far we were doing a pretty rotten job.
Miles' heretical views on the Kyoto process are particularly disturbing because they come from a quintessential insider. Before coming to head the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, he spent the better part of 25 years studying, negotiating, and shaping international agreements on the law of the sea. There is hardly a politician, business leader, or scientist concerned with the subject with whom he is not on first-name terms. If he thinks Kyoto is a dangerous botch, he can't be the only one.
Miles' indictment of Kyoto is complex and difficult to summarize. It begins with a scientific-bureaucratic variation on the classic error of military strategists: planning to fight the next war with the weapons of the last.
When negotiators first met to draft international measures to counter global warming, their model was the very successful international agreement to phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which were progressively destroying the layer of ozone that protects living things from destructive ultraviolet radiation.
Bad model, Miles says: Only a few companies made CFCs, and adequate nondestructive substitutes already existed. Greenhouse warming, on the other hand, is an insanely complex phenomenon involving close to a dozen different compounds-some natural, some human-generated-each with a different chemistry, impact, and half-life in the atmosphere. Trying to control all at the same time and enforce the control worldwide is beyond the capacity of the international system of governance, even if the will to do so existed.
And, says Miles, it doesn't. If everybody who signed on to the original Kyoto Protocol met the carbon dioxide emission-reduction targets for the year 2010, it would cut atmospheric carbon dioxide by only about 10 percent. And nobody—nobody, says Miles, with the possible exception of Britain and Germany—is going to meet those goals.
Worse: Since nobody knows exactly what the "right" concentration of carbon dioxide would be, the Kyoto discussants have arbitrarily set the number at twice the "preindustrial" level of 280 parts per million. Last time anybody looked, the level was 370 ppm and headed for the roof. To meet the Kyoto standard, carbon emissions would have to be cut by 60 percent by 2100. It ain't going to happen. Get used to it.
What is going to happen? If you take the worst-case view, nothing-except continued warming, desertification, rising sea levels, and incalculable disruption of the biome. But, says Miles, thanks to the shortsighted selfishness of the Bush administration, there's a chance for a better outcome.
Not under Bush, of course. Miles says the best hope for slowing the current lemming rush to disaster involves massive investments in energy efficiency and conservation, financed in part by a "carbon tax" on every ounce of fossil fuel effluvium released into the atmosphere. Before the Bushies go there, the rising sea will be lapping at their dewlaps. But Bush & Co. are not forever.
rdowney@seattleweekly.com
The following op-ed column containing Professor Miles's analysis of the shortcomings of the Kyoto-Marrakesh process was sent by the author to the Seattle P-I, the
San Jose Mercury News, the
New York Times, and the
Washington Post and rejected by each. It is published here for the first time.
U.S. POLICY TOWARD THE GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM: TIME FOR A CHANGE
by Edward L. Miles
Virginia and Prentice Bloedel Professor of Marine Studies and Public Affairs, School of Marine Affairs, and Senior Fellow, Joint Institute for the Study of Atmosphere and Oceans, University of Washington, Box 355685, Seattle,WA. 98195.
