Global Warming and Land Use

"The issue of global warming has been framed by a single question: Does the carbon dioxide emitted by industrialized societies threaten the earth's climate?" Political efforts to reduce atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels, such as the The Kyoto Protocol, have been a dismal failure, and largely ignored. Scientific and political debate framing the global warming problem in terms of carbon dioxide reduction is a "social dead end." If debate about Global-Warming is to result in a solution, the whole argument should be framed in a radically different way. We should take steps to reduce our vulnerability to weather today by improving land use and natural resource management practices. By doing so, we would begin to solve the problem of tomorrow's climate. Daniel Sarewitz is a research scholar at Columbia University's Center for Science, Policy and Outcomes. Roger Pielke Jr. is a scientist with the Environmental and Societal Impacts Group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.