It was in the sweltering Washington summer of 1988 that NASA scientist James Hansen, testifying before Congress, popularized the notion that manmade emissions of greenhouse gases were trapping heat here on earth. Hansen's contention that there was a "cause and effect" relationship between "the current climate and human alterations of the atmosphere" became dogma among environmental organizations, green politicians and foundations, UN officials, and even businesses standing to gain from policies adopted to combat the supposed threat.

Less than a generation ago, few would have thought it possible that something as seemingly mundane as the climate could stand center stage in a fierce political struggle. Yet the subject has spawned myriad international conferences, elaborate public-relations campaigns, dire predictions of impending doom, and even a full-fledged treaty complete with binding targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions --not to mention billions of dollars in government-funded research (including no small amount of pork) directed toward finding out more about the dynamics of climate change.

The politization of climate was made possible by the sheer enormity of the stakes involved in the debate. If human activities, particularly those involved in the production and use of energy, are interfering with the earth's climate to the point that a catastrophic warming will result, then prudent measures to avert the harm would certainly be in order. If, on the other hand, the available scientific evidence, in the form of readily available climatological observations, does not show anything other than standard variations in temperature, moisture, etc., then steps taken to solve what may be a non-existent problem could themselves have disastrous consequences.

Since it was adopted in December 1997, the Kyoto Protocol has come to symbolize the debate over global warming. It requires industrialized nations--led by the US, Japan, and the EU--to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases to specified levels by 2012. At its core, Kyoto creates a regime for the control of the use of energy. Yet this ambitious undertaking is tempered by the treaty's exemption of developing countries (who will be the biggest greenhouse-gas emitters in the years to come) and by its failure to create any enforcement mechanism to deal with signatories who violate their commitments. These birth defects, together with harsh disagreements between the US and the EU over how each is to meet its Kyoto commitments, have kept the treaty in diplomatic limbo for over three-and-one-half years. Efforts to breathe new life into the document at a series of UN-sponsored conferences from Buenos Aires to The Hague brought no results.

For its part, the US can hardly afford to take the subject lightly. The burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal, and natural gas) accounts for approximately 70 percent of America's electricity and almost all of its transportation needs. Anything that threatens to reduce the flow of energy into homes, businesses, farms, hospitals, schools, planes, trains, cars, trucks, busses, and every other public and private institution touches upon the very survival of American society. Californians, for their own reasons, are already experiencing firsthand what its like to live in a world of reduced energy consumption. And, by all accounts, they don't like what they see. Yet this is the world that the Kyoto Protocol would impose on the entire country. Under the treaty, the US is to reduce its emissions of manmade greenhouse gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Given current emissions levels--even in the midst of an economic slowdown and energy shortage--the US would have to reduce its emissions by 30 percent over the next decade to meet its Kyoto targets. Small wonder that the Bush administration, facing a serious energy shortage with soaring costs for power and gasoline, turned its back on a treaty that was fundamentally at odds with its goal of restoring America's energy security. This point was underscored by White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsey in a recent address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):

"We believe the Kyoto Protocol could damage our collective prosperity and, in so doing, actually put our long-term environmental health at risk. Fundamentally, we believe that the Protocol both will fail to significantly reduce the long-term risks posed by climate change and, in the short run, will seriously impede our ability to meet our energy needs and economic growth. Further, by imposing high regulatory and economic costs, it may actually reduce our capacity both to find innovative ways out of the environmental consequences of global warming and to achieve the necessary increases in energy production."

Indeed, the White House's energy proposals, unveiled in May, emphasize domestic production and modernization of an infrastructure (pipelines, refineries, etc.) that is woefully inadequate to meet the nation's growing demands for power and transportation. Even though the administration will end up getting less than what it seeks, enough of its energy program is likely to make its way through Congress to preclude any Kyoto-like reductions in the use of fossil fuels.

Bush's move away from Kyoto, which stunned friend and foe alike, effectively gave the treaty what in Washington passes for a decent burial. The unloved accord stood no chance of ever being ratified by the Senate, anyway. Global warming has never really captured the imagination of the American public which reacted with indifference to the scuttling of the Kyoto Protocol. In fact, the subject received scant attention during last year's presidential election, a remarkable circumstance in light of Democratic nominee Al Gore's pivotal role in promoting the idea of global warming. Not even he thought it in his interest to be too closely identified with the issue.

With the United States having effectively withdrawn from the Kyoto Protocol, the question is: What next? Negotiators still plan to meet in Bonn in July to take stock of the dramatic events of the past few months and to lay the groundwork for the Seventh Conference of the Parties (COP-7) in Marrakech, Morocco, in November. Because Kyoto can no longer realistically serve as the basis for talks, negotiators are going to have to get creative.

Ever since it pulled the plug on Kyoto in March, the Bush administration has been huddling to figure out its next steps. In addition to regular briefings from prominent figures on all sides of the global warming debate, the administration is said to be mulling several options. Among them is a scheme to trade emissions credits. It would allow the US or any other industrialized country to acquire credits for reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions by, say, building a high-tech, low-emissions power plant in China or some other developing country. The idea is hardly new; it was pushed for years by Clinton administration negotiators who never succeeded in getting the EU to show any enthusiasm for the plan. EU governments saw it as a means for the US to take credit for reducing emissions, without making any fundamental changes to the way America produces and uses energy.

Similarly, the White House is reported to be toying with the idea of providing incentives for businesses that voluntarily cut their greenhouse-gas emissions. This raises immediate questions about how "voluntary" the program would be. Would there be regulatory repercussions for those who do not volunteer? Would this require Congressional approval, or be administered by regulatory agencies such as EPA? On a broader point, would such voluntary measures satisfy those --environmental ministers, NGOs, green lobbyists, and others comprising the boisterous global-warming support network--who have demanded more drastic action? The answer to this question is clearly no, and therein lies the dilemma facing negotiators in the months and years ahead. The failure of the Kyoto Protocol can be attributed to many factors, not the least of which is that it purports to contain "legally binding" targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Not only did those targets apply to some, but not all, countries, but the idea of binding targets raised the touchy question of national sovereignty. And in no country is that issue touchier than in the US where the treaty met its demise.

If a "straight-jacket" approach is out, then the only alternative would appear to be some arrangement involving voluntary actions. But Kyoto, with its legally binding emissions targets, was a reaction to the failed Rio Treaty of 1992. formally known as the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). It contained commitments by industrialized and developing nations to voluntarily stabilize their emissions. Those commitments were not kept, however, giving rise to the Kyoto Protocol. The attempt by governments to deal with the issue by voluntary means failed, and efforts by those same governments to achieve their ends by compulsory measures also proved fruitless. With both the whip and the velvet glove having shown themselves not equal to the task, negotiators will have to figure out another approach. One of the places they could, but probably won't, look is the evolving world of climate science.

In the midst of all the wrangling, haggling, finger-pointing, and name-calling that have characterized public exchanges over global warming for the past ten years, our understanding of the science of climate change has made dramatic strides. What we know now for certain is how little we knew when the issue first surfaced. Among the things we know is that, contrary to the repeated assurances of proponents of the theory of global warming, the science is far from settled.

This growing uncertainty was underscored in a 1999 report issued by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report, "Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade," received precious little attention in the press, probably because its findings were devoid of the Apocalyptic language that makes for sizzling headlines. Instead, it noted that "a great deal more needs to be understood . .. about global environmental change before we concentrate on 'mitigation' science." The NAS report warned that: "Anthropogenic global change [that caused by mankind] cannot be assessed without adequate understanding and documentation of natural climate variability on time-scales of years to centuries - in other words, without adequate baseline understanding." A subsequent NAS report, "The Science of Regional and Global Change: Putting Knowledge to Work," points out that: "We still do not have adequate knowledge or analytical capability to fully assess the magnitude of .. . [environmental] changes."

What the NAS is saying, in effect, is that climate is an incredibly complex thing, one which does not lend itself to politically-driven sound bites. From geology we know that ice ages have come and gone, that continents have broken apart and drifted from one part of the world to another, and that vast oceans have appeared and disappeared. From paleontology we know that most creatures that inhabited the earth were long extinct before man ever came along. This should give pause to anyone thinking that a few hot days are definitive proof that global warming is upon us. In talking about the climate of a planet that is around 4 billion years old, perspective is important.

No one who takes the subject seriously believes that man has not altered the world around him, including the climate. Ever since agriculture began to spread thousands of years ago, humans have been mucking around the earth. The perennial long-grass prairie of east central North America, for example, was replaced with annual plantings of corn and soy beans by European settlers and their descendants. "Whereas the prairie was a continuous vegetative cover," note climatologists Patrick Michaels and Robert Balling in their book, "The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air on Global Warming, "the replacement crops are seasonal, with bare ground exposed to the sun for half a year, resulting in dramatically different absorption of and heating by the sun's radiant energy."

Given how widespread agriculture is, it is revealing how land use changes are scarcely considered by the computer models that serve as the basis for predictions of human-induced global warming. And those models, known as General Circulation Models (GCMs) have consistently overstated what scant warming has taken place in recent decades, if indeed any has taken place.

Throughout the whole debate on global warming, no authority has been cited more often in the media as a source of objective information on the subject that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (another UN entity), the IPCC describes itself as "an intergovernmental mechanism aimed at providing the basis for development of a realistic and effective internationally accepted strategy for addressing climate change." Thus, in its own words, the IPCC is a "mechanism" to develop a "strategy for addressing climate change." It accepts climate change, or human-induced global warming, as a given and proceeds accordingly. In addition to releasing periodic non-peer-reviewed "summaries" of the state of climate change, which often bare little resemblance to the findings of scientists serving on its panel, the IPCC has published predictions of global warming based on climate models which have consistently overstated actual temperature measurements.

The IPCC's errors have not gone unnoticed. As White House economic advisor Lindsey put it to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in the speech cited above:

". . . we are talking about a gamble of trillions of dollars with our economy, based on the arguments of climate models. If they aren't right, we have no business taking any such gamble. If these models were treated simply as an intellectual exercise, being worked on until they really predicted reality, well then I certainly would not have any problem with them. Instead, the UN-IPCC is blaring that the models foretell imminent doom unless we adopt some severe and very costly measures to save our planet from rising C02 levels. For that purpose, these models have to be right, and they aren't, certifiably."

Though they have undergone some refinements over the years, climate models, for example, have never been able to create a troposphere (the bottom 40,000 of the atmosphere) that behaves anything like the observed climatological data of the last quarter century. To use such imprecise instruments as the basis for policies on something as crucial to the well-being of billions of people as energy, is to engage in a reckless folly. As the National Academy of Sciences recommends, we would be far better served enhancing our knowledge of how climate works before taking precipitous action.

(Dr. Bonner R. Cohen is a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia. He covered the 1977 Kyoto Conference on Climate Change for The Earth Times.)