GLOBAL WARNING.(Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997, global warming)

The Kilinailau Islands--also known as the Tulun Islands, or the Carteret Atoll--which lie four hundred miles from the coast of Papua New Guinea, are tiny, low, and impoverished. Their fate, thanks to global warming, has long been a foregone conclusion. In 1995, most of the shoreline of Piul and Huene washed away, and the island of Iolasa was cut in half by the sea. Saltwater intrusion has now reached the point where islanders can no longer grow breadfruit, and have to rely on emergency food aid. Last month, Reuters reported that the decision had finally been made to give up. The islands' two thousand residents are being relocated, at the expense of the Papua New Guinean government, to the slightly higher ground of Bougainville Island, some sixty miles to the southwest.

The atoll's evacuation fits into a pattern of grim, if unsurprising, news. In September, the area of Arctic sea ice shrank to a record low, prompting glaciologists to conclude that the ice had entered a state of "accelerating, long-term decline," and to warn that at the current rate of loss the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free in summer "well before the end of this century." At about the same time, a team of researchers at the University of Colorado announced that the extent of surface melt on the Greenland ice sheet had reached a new high, and a second team of researchers, at Georgia Tech, reported that the number of Category 4 and Category 5 hurricanes had nearly doubled in the past three decades. Global temperatures, meanwhile, continued their steady upward climb; 2005 is on track to be the hottest year since record-keeping began, in the late eighteen-hundreds. (Eight of the ten hottest years on record have occurred since 1996.)

These events are the all too relevant backdrop for the current round of international climate talks taking place in Montreal. The talks are the first since the Kyoto Protocol entered into force, this past February. Technically, the United States, not being a party to the protocol, will be excluded from many of the sessions in Montreal. But, by virtue of its contribution to climate change--Americans produce nearly a quarter of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions--it will still have a great deal of influence on what does, and does not, get accomplished there.

When the Bush Administration's policy on climate change was first articulated by the President, in early 2002, critics described it as a "total charade," a characterization that, if anything, has come to seem too generous. Stripped down to its essentials, the Administration's position is that global warming is a problem that either will solve itself or won't. The White House has consistently opposed taxes or regulations or mandatory caps to reduce, or even just stabilize, greenhouse-gas emissions, advocating instead a purely voluntary approach, under which companies and individuals can choose to cut their CO2 production--that is, if they feel like it. (At the G-8 summit this summer, the President embarrassed British Prime Minister Tony Blair by refusing to accede even to minor ...