Many-respected scientist like James Hansen the top NASA climate scientist believe that Global Warming is the number one problem facing our planet today. The main reason for the sharp rise in global temperatures since the 1850s is thought to be a steep increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) from human use of fossil fuels. The mechanism of our atmosphere is that gases, like CO₂ and methane, reflect the sun's heat back onto the earth, heating it.
 
This natural greenhouse effect made the earth warm enough for life. Ice core records show that whenever CO₂ has increased in the earth's past, so has temperature. In the last century atmospheric CO₂ has risen steadily, and unnaturally, to above 370 parts per million, the highest level in more than 650,000 years. This increase caused earth's average atmospheric temperature to increase about one degree to about 58 degrees F. Now, according to NOAA, the global warming rate in the last 25 years has risen to 3.6 degrees F per century. This tends to confirm the predictions of temperature increases made by international panels of climate scientists (IPCC). The ocean is heating and becoming very slightly more acidic from the absorption of so much more carbon dioxide. The rate of CO₂ increase is also accelerating, and the level in early 2004 was 379 ppm. These increases, seemingly small, have a giant effect on weather, climate zones, plants and animals, glaciers and river flow -- and thus human life.  Not everyone is convinced that the global CO₂ increase is related to human use of fossil fuels. 

We'll start with Robert Essenhigh, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State.  The professor argued in a 2001 article in Chemical Innovation that average global temperatures were rising but that, contrary to wide popular and scientific opinion, human activity wasn't the principal cause. Rather, the fluctuations we're now seeing are part of a natural cycle that's been going on for eons. Essenhigh's reasoning appealed largely to common sense: Carbon dioxide, the most widely discussed greenhouse gas, is part of earth's vast store of carbon (about 150 billion tons), which is continually being cycled through the oceans, the atmosphere, and vegetation. The human contribution to atmospheric carbon in the form of CO₂ is small, less than 5 percent of the total carbon reservoir. 

One might raise scientific objections to this reasoning, but there's no point. The fact is little can be done to reduce CO₂ emissions regardless of their impact on the environment. CO₂ isn't just an incidental result of human activity that you can get rid of with smokestack scrubbers. Rather, it's an inherent product of the combustion of carbon-based fuels such as coal and oil. The only practical way to produce less in the short term is to use less organic fuel. (Long term we'll switch to Nuclear Power hopefully using hydrogen instead of uranium, solar, wind, and other non-carbon-emitting energy sources, plus biofuels, where the carbon in- and outputs are a wash. In addition, carbon sequestration technologies may enable us to pull excess carbon out of the atmosphere.)

That brings us to the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the U.S. has famously refused to ratify. The Kyoto Protocol calls for drastic cuts in emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.  A 5.2 percent below 1990 levels, or 29 percent below projected 2010 levels. These numbers alone suggest the implausibility of the goal. To brutally oversimplify, greenhouse-gas emissions = energy use = economic activity. (To repeat, I'm speaking short-term.) To produce significantly fewer emissions now your one choice is to shrink your economy, i.e., become poorer. (Russia, to cite a grim example, is among the few industrialized nations that can meet its Kyoto target due to its economic collapse since 1990.)

Some object to such pessimism. They say that better technology; a bunch of belt-tightening, and purchases of "international emissions permits" (countries exceeding their CO2 reduction targets can sell the difference to those that don't) will enable many countries to meet their Kyoto goals. 

Now I believe anything's possible, But here's the thing. Even if all Kyoto targets are met, world carbon emissions will continue to rise. Why? Because Kyoto exempts developing nations, and increased carbon emissions in those countries will swamp any reductions the developed world achieves. Why? Because The U.S., through its huge trade deficits and job exports, is now financing the industrialization of Asia, a result we didn't intend, but may as well make the most of.   

Evidence on this score comes to us from International Energy Outlook 2005, a publication of the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration. The EIA projects that world carbon dioxide emissions will increase more than 50 percent between 2002 and 2025, from 24 billion to 39 billion metric tons (IEO 2005, table 10). If the industrialized nations participating in the Kyoto Protocol ("Annex I" countries) achieve their goals, the EIA projects that by 2025 their CO2 emissions will be reduced by only 0.6 billion tons (IEO 2005, table 12). Meanwhile, emissions in developing countries will increase nearly ten billion tons. In short, we're going to see a huge jump in emissions no matter what industrialized nations do.

Is the solution, then, to rein in the developing nations? Hardly. While we can advise countries such as China and India on ways to use energy more efficiently, we can't seriously expect them to halt their efforts to achieve the prosperity we already have and make no mistake, it's precisely those efforts that are driving up carbon emissions. China alone supposedly expects to add 15,000 megawatts of electric power capacity every year, which will just add to the already enormous Asian Brown Cloud.

So, if nothing can be done to reduce CO₂, should we quit worrying and start buying SUVs? On the contrary. Fossil fuels are to the developing world today what the American forest was to this country two centuries ago--a cheap, easily exploited resource that permits extraordinary economic growth for the short time that it lasts.