Global Warming: The Cost Of Inaction

"Since 1992, American emissions of carbon dioxide â€" the chief cause of climate change â€" have continued to rise more or less at the same rate they were rising previously. Meanwhile, even as the Japanese and the Europeans have pledged to cut their carbon dioxide production, President George W. Bush has blocked all attempts to impose emissions limits in the U.S. In fact, the administration has gone so far as to oppose the efforts of those state...The climate system is highly inertial; it takes several decades for changes already set in motion to become apparent...As the administration likes to point out, the U.S. spends about $2 billion a year on climate-change research. It's possible that as scientists learn more about how the climate works, they will discover that the threshold of dangerous change lies further away than is estimated, and Washington's do-nothing policy will come to seem justified. But the reverse is just as likely. In fact, nearly everything that has been discovered about the climate system recently has tended to suggest that the threshold is closer than suspected."