The Good News About Global Warming

They meet to discuss the future of the planet in the unlikeliest of locations: a warren of offices six floors up from Tom's Restaurant, the New York coffee shop made famous by Seinfeld. In March, a team of scientists led by Dr. James E. Hansen gathered here to criticize a doom-filled report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a powerful committee of 2,000 scientists that dominates the discourse on the issue of global warming. The IPCC and its heavy hitters forecast environmental catastrophe — melting glaciers, lost species, dying forests — in fifty or a hundred years if nothing is done to curb man-made emissions. Hansen, who first recognized climate change as a man-made problem in the 1970s, says he and his fellow scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies were disturbed by this pessimistic scenario.

In late August, his team published a controversial paper accusing the IPCC's gloomy forecasters of, in effect, hindering efforts to slow the warming. Too much attention is placed on carbon dioxide, the most abundant man-made greenhouse gas, Hansen's team said. Cutting CO2 emissions (which come mostly from the burning of oil and gas, the "fossil fuels" that have driven economic progress in the past century) means slowing economic growth. Poor countries say the United States and European Union should make the deepest cuts because they created most of the pollution. The rich nations point to developing countries such as India, China and Russia, whose awakening industrial economies will generate a large volume of carbon dioxide emissions in the decades ahead.

But Hansen says government and business leaders can end-run this impasse by mounting a concerted effort — like the successful negotiations to reduce emissions of the ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbon gases — to cut other gases and pollutants that, molecule for molecule, trap more heat than carbon dioxide.

Already, global-warming naysayers are twisting Hansen's paper to argue that climate change is a nonissue. "The right wing will have fun with this," says Jerry Mahlman, a leading expert in fluid dynamics based in Princeton, New Jersey. "In spite of appearances, what Hansen's recommending is not cheap policy."