Last tango in Buenos Aires.

• Author: Flavin, Christopher
• Position: Climate treaty negotiations in Buenos Aires, Argentina

WHILE CLIMATE TREATY NEGOTIATORS DANCE ON WITH THEIR SLOW GIVE-AND-TAKE, THE CLIMATE ITSELF IS RUNNING AMOK.

When the Kyoto Protocol was signed a year ago, hopes ran high that the world was finally on the way to reducing carbon dioxide emissions and getting the global climate back under control. But since then, complicated new provisions (critics call them loopholes) have sharply divided key governments. The making of the treaty has become a black box - a process largely invisible and incomprehensible to the public. Meanwhile, the apparent effects of global warming are beginning to break out in ways that call for far more decisive action than the past ten years of negotiation have produced. Unless the November meeting of climate treaty negotiators in Buenos Aires demonstrates real progress, it may be time to take a whole new approach to the problem.

In the following pages, three authors define the challenge. Christopher Flavin leads off below, with a candid assessment of the prospects for the Kyoto Protocol - what's wrong with it and what has to be remedied soon. Seth Dunn analyzes the welling tensions between industrial and developing countries, and the prospects of finding common ground. Ashley Mattoon looks at how the negotiators have bogged down over the issue of carbon "sinks."

The world's climate rarely sends clear signals. The interactions of hundreds of variables - of sunlight, ocean currents, precipitation, fire, volcanic eruptions, topography, and the respiration of living things - produce a complex system that scientists are just beginning to understand, and that defies precise forecasts. In any given year, some regions are warmer than normal while others are cooler. Almost any short-term climatic phenomenon, even an extreme one, can be explained as something that falls within the enormous range of natural climatic variability. Until this year.

Even before 1998 comes to a close, it is clear that this year is one for the meteorological record books. Although annual temperature records have become routine recently - all 14 of the warmest years since 1860 have occurred in the past two decades - the record is usually broken by a couple of hundredths of a degree. But the average temperature for January-August 1998 was a full four tenths of a degree warmer than the average for 1997, the previous record-setting year (see [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED], page 12). In fact, six of the first eight months of 1998 set an all-time temperature record for the month - exceeding the monthly figures recorded in the 139 years that global average temperatures have been tracked.

At first, scientists were inclined to attribute these surprising readings to El Nino, a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific that began in 1997 and extended through the first half of 1998. But as they looked back at the historical trend, it became clear that previous El Nino-related warmings had been far more modest. As month after month of record-breaking data spewed from their computers, the atmospheric scientists expressed growing awe. James Baker, administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said, "There is no time in recorded data history that we have seen this sequence of record-setting months."

In earlier years, some scientists' concerns about global warming were assuaged by the fact that satellite-based microwave measurements of temperatures high in the atmosphere since 1979 did not appear to reflect the warming trend from ground-based readings. But this slender straw was swept away in August by a report by scientists Frank Wentz and Matthias Schabel that appeared in the British journal Nature. It demonstrated that the widely reported satellite data were skewed by the failure to account for the predictable gravity-induced decay in the orbits of the satellites. Once corrected for, the satellite data demonstrate the same broad warming trend as the ground-level thermometers - including the dramatic spike in 1998.

Scientists have known for some time that the climate is a "non-linear system" that may respond marginally or not at all to initial changes - but then leap suddenly to a new equilibrium, if pushed a little further. Although it is too early to know for sure, the global climate may have just crossed such a threshold. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, human activities have added 925 billion tons of carbon dioxide (C[O.sub.2]) to the atmosphere, taking concentrations of this heat-trapping gas to the highest levels in 160,000 years. The climate record shows that when C[O.sub.2] concentrations reached even close to such levels in the past - during the Eemian interglacial period, for example, beginning 135,000 years ago - they were accompanied by a rapid rise in temperatures.

Though it is impossible to connect any single weather event to global climate change, the past year has been marked by a worldwide pattern of unusually severe weather. China was swept by its worst floods in three decades last summer, with 56 million people reported to be at least temporarily displaced from their homes in the Yangtze basin alone. The $36 billion in estimated damages matches or exceeds the total weather-related losses for the world in every year prior to 1995. Meanwhile, two-thirds of Bangladesh was underwater for most of the summer, as torrential monsoon rains cascaded down from the Himalaya and storm surges came up from the sea, covering much of the capital, Dhaka, and destroying the country's rice crop.

At least 54 other countries were hit by severe floods in 1998, and at least 45 were stricken by droughts, many of which led to runaway wildfires. Tropical forests normally do not burn, but unusually harsh droughts contributed to a series of unprecedented fires in southeast Asia starting in late 1997 and in the Amazon through most of 1998. Last spring, much of southern and central Mexico was aflame, leading to air quality alerts in Texas and noticeably smoky air as far north as Chicago. By early summer, scores of fires were sweeping the sub-tropical forests of Florida, leading to the evacuation of an entire county.

Rarely have the rhythms of the natural world been so out of synch with those of the political world. Even as the climate sent ever-stronger signals of disruption in 1998, efforts to deal with the problem bogged down in glacial and contentious negotiations over the terms of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

The effort to build a global climate agreement is in fact already a decade-long saga that began with a major scientific conference on the issue in Toronto in 1988. The scientists there called for a 20 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2005, which then led to extended efforts on the part of scientists, industrial interest groups, non-governmental organizations, and politicians to forge an international agreement to move in that direction. By the time of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the "Framework" Convention on Climate Change had been forged, but due to the strong objections of the Bush Administration in the United States, still did not include legally binding limits.

After Rio, governments worked for several years to strengthen the climate treaty by adding specific limits on the amounts of greenhouse gases that could be emitted by each industrial country. This process was expected to culminate in the signing of a protocol to the convention that included legally binding emissions limits, in Kyoto, Japan last December. But agreement proved elusive. As the Kyoto conference began, governments were still widely divided on key elements of the agreement, including the overall level to which emissions would be limited. The United States, for example, only wanted to cut emissions back to the 1990 level, while the European Union wanted to cut them to 15 percent below that level.

By the beginning of its final week, the Kyoto conference had become "an emotional roller-coaster for delegates who watched the...