WASHINGTON – All of a sudden, global warming is hot.
After years of languishing on Capitol Hill, efforts to curb global warming have picked up momentum, powered by a growing bipartisan belief that climate change can no longer be ignored.
On Tuesday, advocacy groups testified at a House hearing that federal scientists have been pressured to play down global warming, alleging that the White House for years has micromanaged the government’s climate programs and has closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.
During the hearing, two groups produced a survey of 279 government climate scientists showing that many of them say they have been subjected to political pressure aimed at downplaying the climate threat. Their complaints included a challenge to using the phrase “global warming” and raising uncertainty on issues on which most scientists agree.
Drew Shindell, a climate scientist with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said that climate scientists frequently have been dissuaded from talking to the media about their research, though NASA’s restrictions have been eased.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has declared addressing climate change a top priority for the House.
Climate change also was a leading topic in the Senate, where presidential contenders for 2008 lined up at a hearing called by Sen. Barbara Boxer. They expounded – and at times tried to outdo each other – on why they believed Congress must act to reduce heat-trapping greenhouse gases.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., considered a front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination, has introduced a bill to impose mandatory limits on the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming and intends to introduce another to target vehicle emissions by raising miles-per-gallon rules. His co-sponsors on the first bill include two leading Democratic presidential contenders, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.
President Bush acknowledged in his Jan. 24 State of the Union speech that climate change needs to be dealt with.
All the attention is an abrupt break from the past, when the issue – the role man-made pollutants play in the increase in the Earth’s temperature – was shrugged off by many politicians. Especially among Republicans, it was regarded as an untested theory or an alarmist fantasy.
“There has been a sea change in this issue over the last year,” said Cathy Duvall, national political director of the Sierra Club. “It went from a backburner issue to something people understand is a problem. Now they are looking for leaders to take action.”
Discussions came as an authoritative report, compiled by 2,000 climate experts and other scientists, is expected to be released Friday in Paris, warning that human-caused global warming is destined to get much worse.
Also Tuesday, the executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, Achim Steiner, asked Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to convene an international summit later this year to combat climate change, an official said, joining a chorus of world leaders and scientists calling for urgent action to cut greenhouse gases.
Ban is scheduled to meet Kenyan president Mwai Kibaki today to discuss the country hosting such a summit.
World temperatures have risen to levels not seen in thousands of years, propelled by rapid warming the past 30 years, scientists say. They attribute at least some of the past century’s 1-degree rise in global temperatures to the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources.
Associated Press
Sen. John McCain (left), R-Ariz., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., both presidential contenders for 2008, are co-sponsoring legislation to set mandatory limits on greenhouse gases and require better gas mileage in cars.
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