The climate is changing and the global community needs to act,
according to three panelists who spoke Wednesday at the School of
Law.
The symposium was sponsored by the Environmental Law Center at
the UCLA School of Law and the Donald Bren School of Environmental
Science and Management at UCSB.
Jody Freeman, a UCLA professor and an associate dean at the Bren
School, helped organize the event and said the implications of
global warming cannot be ignored.
Victoria Weatherford, a first-year political science and economics
student also involved with organizing the event, said panelists
were selected specifically to approach environmental issues from an
interdisciplinary perspective.
Professor Richard Turco from UCLA’s atmospheric sciences
department said despite some people’s notions that the
climate isn’t changing, the evidence in the affirmative is
overwhelming.
“We don’t have the smoking gun, in a sense, but we
do have a really strong circumstantial case that the earth’s
climate is changing significantly,” Turco said.
Turco compared global warming to ozone depletion. While the
discovery of an ozone hole over Antarctica was the “smoking
gun” in the debate over the reality of ozone depletion, Turco
said the consequences of waiting for proof that the climate is
changing could have devastating consequences.
“The idea of waiting … would seem to be the wrong
approach,” Turco said. “How would you mitigate the
effect? Once the carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, it stays
there for a hundred years.”
David Victor, a political science professor at Stanford
University, said major flaws exist in the architecture of
international contracts, including the Kyoto Protocol, that attempt
to curb global warming.
A lack of incentive exists for countries to sign agreements with
unclear benefits, Victor said. Russia has no incentive to sign a
treaty curbing global warming because, with its cold climate,
Russia could benefit from a temperature increase, Victor said.
To generate incentives to sign agreements, Victor suggested
expanding the scope of contracts.
“Stop thinking about the climate problem as an
environmental problem in isolation of other problems. (Countries)
have interests in other areas of economic cooperation,”
Victor said.
Charles Kolstad, president of the Association of Environmental
and Resource Economists, said the Bush administration has been
“napping” on the issue of climate change, even with
their proposal to reduce U.S. emission intensity.
Emission intensity is a measure of emissions per unit of gross
national product. In the decade following 1990, U.S. emission
intensity decreased by 17.1 percent. Bush’s proposal asks
businesses to voluntarily reduce emissions to help achieve an 18
percent intensity reduction over 10 years.
Kolstad said that while the ideas behind the proposal are
credible, the way in which the administration has approached them
is not.
“Bringing down the intensity by just a bit more than what
it does on its own … is what the Bush Administration proposed.
… If that’s what you’re going to talk about, then
let’s not talk about it anymore,” he said.