Would Kyoto treaty work?(The Bottom Line of Government, part 2)(Editorial)

Before people surrender wealth to governments in response to global warming, they should have reasonable assurance that programs on offer will work. The international protocol signed in Kyoto, Japan, last year can't satisfy this simple standard.

It can't satisfy the standard because it can't calibrate the problem--a worst-case guess based on a sweeping hypothesis grounded in a single observation.

The observation: The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has grown since humans began improving their lives by burning fossil fuel.

The hypothesis: Because [CO.Sub.2] is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, a build-up of it must heat Earth's surface. …