It's activity like burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The U.S. is by far the largest polluter. Corell says there's so much greenhouse gas in the air already that more temperature rise is inevitable.
Even if we stopped using every car, truck, and power plant — stopping all greenhouse gas emissions — Mayewski says the planet would continue to warm anyway. "Would continue to warm for another, about another degree," he says.
This is a refrain we often hear also; we can't really do anything about it. But, Pelley pushes the issue by saying this:
One big supporter of climate science research is the Bush administration, spending $5 billion a year. But Mr. Bush refuses to sign a treaty forcing cuts in greenhouse gases.
The treaty he's talking about is the Kyoto treaty and it didn't pass in the Senate, under Clinton, and Clinton didn't want to sign it either. It hasn't been reproposed in the Senate because no one wants it and everyone acknoweldges that it doesn't do any good anyway.
Brad DeLong comments today
First, climatologists' model-based central projections of the effects of global warming over the next century are just that: model-based central projections. There is enormous uncertainty about what will happen. It might be the case (although most scientists would bet heavily against it) that our pumping CO2 into the atmosphere will have little effect on climate--that the CO2 will be quickly absorbed into the oceans and terrestrial biosphere (making gardening much easier), and that any residual warming will be largely balanced out by the cooling effects of industrial soot. It is likely to be the case that the central projection of a 4 to 5 degree Fahrenheit warming over the next century will be roughly accurate. It might be the case that something horrible might happen--bubbles of methane trapped beneath the sea floor being liberated to greatly increase the greenhouse effect, global warming disrupting the Gulf Stream and causing a local cooling in Europe that would give Rome the climate of Oslo and produce 400 million Europeans anxious to move someplace else. The central projection of the effects of global warming over the next century looks bearable, but the extreme possibilities may well not be. Any approach to dealing with global warming that does not create the capability for massive and swift action should things be worse than currently expected is fatally flawed.
Second, those who will suffer from global warming are largely in the global south. If global warming does (say) increase the magnitude of major typhoons and does raise the sea level a bit, by the latter part of this century more than 100 million people in the Ganges delta will be at risk of drowning if a high tide accompanies the storm surge of a major typhoon in the Bay of Bengal. The managers and shareholders of companies like Halliburton that will gain from inaction on global warming are a different and distinct group from the tropical peasants who stand to lose their health and their lives. Any claim that "instead of Kyoto we should be doing X" has to be accompanied by a plan to actually do X. Otherwise, the claim that inaction on global warming enhances world welfare is likely to be very false indeed, as it is hard to believe that on the scale of human happiness higher incomes in the global north will outweigh nastier, more brutish, and shorter lives in the global south. It is one thing to say that the resources the Kyoto Protocol wants to use to fight global warming could be used to provide first-class public health and economic infrastructure to the global south. It is another to say that these resources, instead, will be used to get every American household a second DVD player and every tenth American household a power boat.
DeLong is hardly a conservative, but he doesn't believe that the only solution is to stop burning fossil fuels and he does believe that the models are fallible.
I made a similar point, that a lot of things can happen over the next 100 years and we can do a lot of more effective things than cutting fossil fuel emissions here and criticism of the Kyoto treaty here.
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