Week 1: Mercury Rising
This year's record highs in global temperatures require attention, wisdom, and leadership. By Stephen M. Wolf

n August, while many of us were on vacation or certainly contemplating one, a disturbing story appeared in many newspapers: July was the hottest month ever to be recorded. The average global temperature of 61.7 degrees Fahrenheit, including the wintertime days of the southern hemisphere, wasn't just a little bit higher than the previous recorded high, but half a degree higher, an enormous jump in such data. It was fully 1.26 degrees above normal.

While July was the hottest month on record, it was not an aberration. At the time, it was the seventh consecutive month that global temperatures had broken the previous record for the month, and the trend has continued.

At the time, we sensed that something was strange with our weather patterns as day after day went by in Texas with no rain, the thermometer over 100 degrees. Deaths from the heat soared well over 100. Elsewhere in the South, crops shriveled from lack of rain. And we had the spectacle of vast areas of Florida being blanketed with smoke from widespread wildfires roaring through dry forest and scrubland.

The two phenomena--the year's temperature records and the drought and fire conditions--may or may not be proof of a cause-effect relationship from global warming, but linked to other developments over the past few months, even skeptics should be pausing to wonder.

New information from the U.S. National Climatic Data Center show that the average temperature of the Earth's oceans is higher by half a degree. The Wall Street Journal reported on August 12 that the head of the center, Robert Quayle, was so stunned by the numbers coming from his computers that he called another center in the United Kingdom that does similar studies to double check. Its numbers were even higher.

"This is pretty striking. Sea temperatures are pretty conservative sorts of things. They don't change rapidly like air temperatures do," Mr. Quayle told the Journal, adding that he believes that more is responsible for the change than the effect of El Niño.

Buttressing the concern of a growing number of scientists about the effect of permanent climate change were two very interesting stories by William K. Stevens, a science writer for the New York Times. In one, on August 12, Mr. Stevens surveyed health experts and found a massive surge in diseases such as malaria, Rift Valley fever, and cholera in areas that were inundated with unusually heavy rains stemming from El Niño. Meanwhile, respiratory diseases surged as a result of forest fires in El Niño-affected drought regions of Southeast Asia.

In the second story, Mr. Stevens recorded a remarkable transformation taking place in Alaska, where the great Columbia Glacier has retreated by an astonishing eight miles in the last 16 years, a phenomenon by no means simply a function of the recent El Niño.

"Alaska is thawing, and much of northern Russia and Canada with it, and many scientists say that the warming of these cold regions is one of the most telling signals that the planet's climate is changing. Experts have long said that in an era of global warming, this bellwether region should warm more and faster than the Earth as a whole, and that is just how things are turning out," Mr. Stevens wrote in the August 18 Times.

What are we to make of all this? That the evidence of global warming, as striking as it may be, still is not conclusive as to trend or cause, so we should wait for further developments? That there is little we can do even if the evidence is more convincing?

As with many issues affected by longer-term trends, there is a dilemma in matching today's policies and decisions with tomorrow's uncertainties. If we act rashly, we may run the risk of wasting scarce resources to little end. If we fail to act, we may run the risk of discovering too late that developments that might have been arrested have become irreversible. I have spent portions of my life analyzing risks, and common sense alone tells me that this is a situation that begs for action, not delay.

I am no expert on these issues, but there seem to be at least two areas that would benefit from more focused attention.

One is the global Kyoto Protocol signed last December that calls for developed countries to cut emissions of so-called greenhouse gases. The United States has yet to ratify and the debate on the issue has been all but nonexistent. Rather than seeking ways to escape action, we should be looking for compromise solutions to move the process forward. At the one-year review conference next month, will we have found the wisdom to allow us to take a leadership role?

Second, there is no rule that says business leaders and environmentalists have to be on opposite sides of this issue. Today, there is a large gap of mutual suspicion that often thwarts progress rather than assisting it. There are many avenues--alternative technologies, forest conservation, energy efficiencies--that provide common ground. It need not be either hard or painful to begin the process of change. It may well be very hard and very painful if we do not.

US AIRWAYS Attaché November 1998

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