An effort by the Bush administration to improve federal climate
research has answered some questions but lacks a focus on impacts of
changing conditions and informing those who would be most affected, a
panel of experts has found.
The Climate Change Science Program,
created in 2002 by President Bush to improve climate research across 13
government agencies, has also been hampered by governmental policies
that have grounded earth-observing satellites and dismantled programs
to monitor environmental conditions on earth, concluded the report,
issued by the National Academies, the nation’s pre-eminent scientific
advisory group.
In a printed statement, Veerabhadran Ramanathan,
the panel’s chairman, said that the program’s basic scientific efforts
had constituted “an important initiative that has broadened our
knowledge of climate change.”
Among other things, the report noted, the effort has helped resolve
disputes over whether the earth’s atmosphere is warming significantly
or not, allowing scientists to compare data and agree that warming is
occurring.
But the report cited more problems than successes
in the government’s research program. Of the $1.7 billion spent by the
program on climate research each year, only about $25 million to $30
million has gone to studies of how climate change will affect human
affairs, for better or worse, the report said.
“Discovery
science and understanding of the climate system are proceeding well,
but use of that knowledge to support decision-making and to manage
risks and opportunities of climate change is proceeding slowly,”
concluded the 15-member panel, made up mainly of scientists from
universities and two companies, BP and the chemical manufacturer
DuPont.
John H. Marburger III, the White House science
adviser, issued a statement yesterday thanking the science academies
for the “thoughtful review,” and saying several issues highlighted in
the report “are already being addressed.”
The panel found that
program delays had been common: Only two of the program’s 21 planned
overarching reports on specific climate issues have been published in
final form; only three more are in the final draft stage. And not
enough effort has gone to translating advances in climate science into
information that is useful to local elected officials, farmers, water
managers and others who may potentially be affected by climate shifts,
whatever their cause, the panel found.
One problem, the panel
noted, is a lack of communication between government researchers and
officials, industries or communities that could be affected, Dr.
Ramanathan said in a telephone interview.
“We don’t know what they need, and they don’t know what we can provide,” he said, referring to the government’s science effort.
The program was originally framed by Mr. Bush as a way to focus
research on pressing issues and produce a broad suite of results in two
to five years.
A major hindrance to progress, the panel’s report
said, is that the climate program’s director and subordinates lack the
authority to determine how money is spent.
The report also
emphasized the risks posed by changes in government priorities that
have shifted focus away from earth-observing satellites — the panel
cited a long list of orbiting probes that were being cut or delayed —
and ground-based monitoring projects like efforts to track snowpack and
stream flows.
“The loss of existing and planned satellite
sensors is perhaps the single greatest threat to the future success” of
climate research, the report said.
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