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Senators acknowledge global warming, but question solutions

WASHINGTON — Republican senators who have opposed action to deal with global warming said Thursday they now accept that the Earth's climate is changing and human activity is the cause.

But at a hearing of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, they continued to express skepticism over whether the world can use conservation and renewable energy sources to solve the problem.

"I have grown to believe, as many of my colleagues have, that there is a substantial human effect on the environment," said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, traditionally part of a core group of Senate Republicans who have fought legislation to deal with climate change.

Craig and others said the country must turn to nuclear power to produce electricity that does not result in additional emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

"I don't think the issue is whether we have a major international problem," said Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.. "I think the question is how do we solve it, and I think we have too many people talking as if it's simple."

The hearing, which Domenici announced last month while the Senate debated — and rejected — a measure that would cap greenhouse gas emissions, came as the panel's House counterpart was conducting a controversial investigation of scientists responsible for key studies of global climate change.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, touched off protests from scientists and even one member of his own party by requesting data and financial records from scientists whose research led to the conclusion that the Earth's current warming trend is unprecedented in the last 1,000 years.

Some advocates of action to deal with global warming saw Thursday's hearing and comments by senators as evidence of a political shift on the subject, despite President Bush's refusal to join other world leaders in advocating action on the issue.

"The Republican base has shifted in the last year," said John Topping, president and founder of the Climate Institute, the first environmental group to be dedicated solely to climate change.

He said recent opinion polls show that almost as many registered and self-described Republicans as Democrats agree with statements that the climate is changing and human activity is responsible.

"In California, you have Governor (Arnold) Schwarzenegger talking about reducing the state's carbon output by 2050 to 80 percent below 1990 levels," said Topping. "There is a lot of movement going on in the Republican Party, which is moving faster on this issue than the Democrats, I think."

The Senate committee heard National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone, himself a climate scientist, say the planet's temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees since the 1970s and that "nearly all climate scientists" believe the carbon dioxide given off by the combustion of coal, oil and natural gas is the main cause.

Cicerone and Mario Molina, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery that man-made chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons were destroying the ozone layer, also agreed with the observation that nuclear power has to be a major part of the solution.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., chided environmental groups for saying "this is a terrifically urgent problem" that will be solved by "putting on a few solar panels and building some windmills."

Noting that the United States uses 25 percent of the world's energy, he said he saw no "way in the world that scientifically there is a way to limit global warming in the United States unless we do what France is doing" and build more nuclear plants.

"Now is that is true? Why doesn't the scientific community say that?" he asked. "Nuclear power is the only way."

Cicerone replied that he could not offer "much disagreement with that."

"We all wish that in the last 20 years, the country had made an aggressive effort to make it safer," he said.

Molina said he was a member of a private group, the National Energy Policy Commission, which advocates use of nuclear power to help solve the climate change problem.

Climate scientist James W. Hurrell of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said at the end of the hearing that he was "very heartened to hear from this committee that they feel the question is not whether or not this is a problem, but how to go about addressing it."