HOT TOPIC.(The Talk of the Town)(global warming)

SHOUTS & MURMURS, by Paul Rudnick

Except in certain benighted precincts--oil-industry-funded Web sites, the Bush White House, Michael Crichton's den--no one wastes much energy these days trying to deny global warming. Credit Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," or this winter's snowless ski season in the Alps, or the fact that it was seventy-two degrees in Central Park on January 6th. Still, the release last week of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change represents an important, perhaps even historic, event.

Founded in 1988, the I.P.C.C. is a joint venture of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. Every four or five years, it conducts an exhaustive survey of the available data and issues a multi-volume assessment of the state of the climate. By the time the I.P.C.C. publishes an assessment, it has been vetted by thousands of scientists, as well as by the organization's hundred and ninety-odd participating governments. The process guarantees that I.P.C.C. reports are conservative--indeed, frequently out of date--since every statement has had to pass review not just in Paris and London but also in Riyadh and Washington. The first I.P.C.C. assessment, issued in 1990, was noncommittal on the source of the warming that had been observed up to that point. In each subsequent report, the organization has moved cautiously but inexorably toward assigning responsibility. Last week's assessment, the fourth, put the likelihood that human beings are the cause of global warming--now evident from "increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level"--at ninety per cent. It went on to note that temperatures will continue to climb for decades, that heat waves and floods will become more frequent, and that the last time the Arctic and the Antarctic were warmer than they are today for an extended period--before the start of the last Ice Age--global sea levels were at least thirteen feet higher.

As it happens, the release of the report coincides with an important political shift. Though President Bush remains recalcitrant--he could barely bring himself to utter the phrase "climate change" in his State of the Union address last month--the Republican defeat in November has removed from power Congress's most reliable obstructionists. In the Senate, James Inhofe, of Oklahoma, best known for having declared global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," ceded the chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to Barbara Boxer, of California. "For the last twelve years . . . all we've been talking about is, 'Is there global warming?' " Boxer recently told USA Today. "I'm over it. We need to move forward." Boxer herself has signed on to a bill, sponsored by Senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, that would cut America's carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050. Last week, when she held an unusual "open-mike" hearing to review legislative proposals on climate change, twenty-five senators showed up, including the Presidential hopefuls John McCain, ...