Will We Ever Stop Global Warming?(realistic goals in the effort to stop global warming)

An aimless ramble through the countryside used to be about as far as you could get from the hurly-burly of politics. Half a century ago Richard Fitter strolled through Oxfordshire making notes on local birds and plants. He recorded the arrival of the first blossoms of spring, the first birds to sing and the first butterflies to emerge from their cocoons. As a professional naturalist, he turned the fruits of his walks into popular books such as "London's Natural History" and "The Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe," but he had no pretensions toward academic research. He just thought that some day, someone might find his observations important.

His son, Alastair Fitter, grew up in a less innocent age. As head of the biology department at the University of York, he looked at his father's 47 years of meticulous scribbling on 385 different species of British plants and saw a potentially valuable addition to the debate over global warming. He analyzed the data and reported the results of his findings in a paper published last month, with his father, in the journal Science. Father and son found that 16 percent of the Oxfordshire plants studied have been flowering significantly earlier in the 1990s than in previous decades. The white dead nettle, a small, common perennial with white flowers, has been blooming in January rather than March, 55 days early. "Spring is changing," says the younger Fitter.

The finding is just the latest in a spate of new data on global warming that comes not from climate scientists with their weather balloons and elaborate computer models, but from biologists and geologists in the field. Last week President George W. Bush got a similar message in the form of a report issued from his own administration on the status of climate change in the United States. Judging from his reaction, it was as expected as a June snowstorm, and just about as welcome. "I read the report put out by the bureaucracy," he said. The report made headlines because it supposedly amounted to Bush's admission that the Earth really is warming and that carbon emissions are the cause. Would the United States soon follow Japan, which joined Europe last week in ratifying the Kyoto treaty to curb carbon emissions? Not a chance. Bush's handlers held fast to their reluctance; since there's still the shadow of a doubt, they seemed to say, let's just sit tight.

Despite the political bickering, it's becoming clear that Earth's ecosystems have already cast their vote: they've begun the process of adapting to a warmer world. It isn't just the word of a few English naturalists. Scientists reported last week that Greenland's glaciers have been sliding into the sea at an accelerated pace. Water, apparently from more-rapid-than-usual melting, seeps between the glaciers and the underlying ground and acts as a lubricant. Last March, a Rhode Island-size hunk of ice in Antarctica broke off and fell into the sea, a sign of warming at the South Pole. Biologists in Europe and the United States have reported birds extending their ranges northward. A British and French study found that higher temperatures in the North Atlantic are causing warm-water species of ocean plankton to migrate north. And a European-American team used satellite data to show that trees in the northernmost quarter of the planet are becoming green ...