The heat is on: as evidence of global warming mounts, President Bush tries to balance the environment's health with the economy's.

• Author: Revkin, Andrew C.
• Position: National

When it comes to global warming, who's feeling the heat? One answer: most everyone on Earth. But in the sense of being pressured to act, President George W. Bush has stayed cool.

Last year, national and international panels of hundreds of climate experts agreed that most of the warming during the past 50 years has probably been caused by people, mainly through burning coal and oil--creating carbon dioxide, a gas that traps heat in the air like a greenhouse roof.

The warming has intensified from the 1990s through today. The year 2001 was the second-warmest ever recorded, below only 1998. This year is expected to be hotter still. If people keep pumping out billions of tons of the so-called greenhouse gases each year, as we've been doing for decades, temperatures could rise 3 to 9 degrees this century, many scientists say, potentially leading to devastating droughts and floods.

The solution might seem a no-brainer: Stop producing those gases and the problem goes away. Last fall, 180 nations approved the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty that would require rapid cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. But there are deep divisions of opinion on such a global problem. One camp seeks to forestall catastrophe with strict limits on pollution. The other--including the President--sees peril in doing too much.

Bush, alone among major world leaders, rejected the Kyoto Protocol, saying he would come up with a better approach for the U.S. In a Valentine's Day speech, the President announced his plan. He would encourage voluntary changes for companies designed to limit, but not halt, the growth in the gas emissions. A progress report would be done in 2012, and more-stringent measures might kick in, if warranted.

The environmental threat remained uncertain, Bush said, but the economic harm from rasher actions was clear. If he agreed to the stricter Kyoto proposals, Bush said, the cost to bring industry and consumers into line could hit $400 billion.

Support for the President has come from a few climate scientists who think the dangers of warming are overstated, and frond industries that emit lots of greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide, or sell products that do so, like SUVs.

But many experts say they are shocked. After analyzing Bush's policy, they say it almost guarantees a hotter future in which ecosystems and many countries will suffer.

The critics include Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Irvine, who chaired a National Academy of Sciences panel that provided advice to the White House last year. Cicerone says it's a mistake to use uncertainty in the science as a reason to take a relaxed approach to global warming.

Continued growth in emissions of heat-trapping gases, Cicerone says, will inevitably make any risks greater. "This situation is not...