⚫ that major past climate changes were either uncorrelated with changes in CO2 or were characterized by temperature changes which preceded changes in CO2 by 100's to thousands of years.

• that increases in temperature on the order of 1F are not catastrophic and may be beneficial.

⚫ that Kyoto, fully implemented, will have little detectable impact on climate regardless of what one expects for warming. This is partly due to the fact that Kyoto will apply only to developed nations. However, if one expected large global warming, even the extension of Kyoto to developing nations would still leave one with large warming.

None of the above points to catastrophic consequences from increasing CO2. Most point towards, and all are consistent with minimal impacts. Moreover, the last item provides a definitive disconnect between Kyoto and science. Should a catastrophic scenario prove correct, Kyoto will not prevent it. If we view Kyoto as an insurance policy, it is a policy where the premium appears to exceed the potential damages, and where the coverage extends to only a small fraction of the potential damages. Does anyone really want this? I suspect not. Given the rejection of the extensive US concessions at the Hague, it would appear that the Europeans do not want the treaty, but would prefer that the US take the blame for ending the foolishness. As a practical matter, a large part of the response to any climate change, natural or anthropogenic, will be adaptation, and that adaptation is best served by wealth.

Our own research suggests the presence of a major negative feedback involving clouds and water vapor, where models have completely failed to simulate observations (to the point of getting the sign wrong for crucial dependences). If we are right, then models are greatly exaggerating sensitivity to increasing CO2. Even if we are not right (which is always possible in science; for example, IPCC estimates of warming trends for the past twenty years were almost immediately acknowledged to be wrong-so too were claims for arctic ice thinning), the failure of models to simulate observations makes it even less likely that models are a reliable tool for predicting climate.

This brings one to what is probably the major point of disagreement:

Can one trust computer climate models to correctly predict the response to increasing CO2?

As the accompanying cartoon suggests, our experience with weather forecasts is not particularly encouraging though it may be argued that the prediction of gross climate changes is not as demanding as predicting the detailed weather. Even here, the situation is nuanced. From the perspective of the precautionary principle, it suffices to believe that the existence of a computer prediction of an adverse situation means that such an outcome is possible rather than correct in order to take 'action.' The burden of proof has shifted to proving that the computer prediction is wrong. Such an approach effectively deprives society of science's capacity to solve problems and answer questions. Unfortunately, the incentive structure in today's scientific enterprise contributes to this impasse. Scientists associate public recognition of the relevance of their subject with support, and relevance has come to be identified with alarming the public. It is only human for scientists to wish for support and recognition, and the broad agreement among scientists that climate change is a serious issue must be viewed from this human perspective. Indeed, public perceptions have significantly influenced the science itself. Meteorologists, oceanographers, hydrologists and others at MIT have all been redesignated climate scientists-indicating the degree to which scientists have hitched their futures to this issue.

That said, it has become common to deal with the science by referring to the IPCC 'scientific consensus.' Claiming the agreement of thousands of scientists is certainly easier than trying to understand the issue or to respond to scientific questions; it also effectively intimidates most citizens. However, the invocation of the IPCC is more a mantra than a proper reflection on that flawed document. The following points should be kept in mind. (Note that almost all reading and coverage of the IPCC is restricted to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers which are written by representatives from governments, NGO's and business; the full reports, written by participating scientists, are largely ignored.) In what follows, I will largely restrict myself to the report of Working Group I (on the science). Working Groups II and III dealt with impacts and responses.

• The media reports rarely reflect what is actually in the Summary. The media generally replace the IPCC range of 'possible' temperature increases with 'as much as' the maximum-despite the highly unlikely nature of the maximum. The range, itself, assumes, unjustifiably, that at least some of the computer models must be correct. However, there is evidence that even the bottom of the range is an overestimate. (A recent study at MIT found that the likelihood of actual change being smaller than the IPCC lower bound was 17 times more likely than that the upper range

would even be reached, and even this study assumed natural variability to be what computer models predicted, thus exaggerating the role of anthropogenic forcing.) The media report storminess as a consequence despite the admission in the summary of no such observed relation. To be sure, the summary still claims that such a relation may emerge despite the fact that the underlying physics suggests the opposite. The media's emphasis on increased storminess, rising sea levels, etc. is based not on any science, but rather on the fact that such features have more graphic impact than the rather small increases in temperature. People who have experienced day and night and winter and summer have experienced far greater changes in temperature, and retirement to the sun belt rather than the Northwest Territory represents an overt preference for warmth.

• The summary does not reflect the full document (which still has not been released although it was basically completed last August). For example, I worked on Chapter 7, Physical Processes. This chapter dealt with the nature of the basic processes which determine the response of climate, and found numerous problems with model treatments including those of clouds and water vapor. The chapter was summarized with the following sentence: "Understanding of climate processes and their incorporation in climate models have improved, including water vapour, sea-ice dynamics, and ocean heat transport."

• The vast majority of participants played no role in preparing the summary, and were not asked for agreement.

• The draft of the Policymakers Summary was significantly modified at Shanghai. The IPCC, in response to the fact that the Policymakers Summary was not prepared by participating scientists, claimed that the draft of the Summary was prepared by a (selected) subset of the 14 coordinating lead authors. However, the final version of the summary differed significantly from the draft. For example the draft concluded the following concerning attribution:

From the body of evidence since IPCC (1996), we conclude that there has been a discernible human influence on global climate. Studies are beginning to separate the contributions to observed climate change attributable to individual external influences, both anthropogenic and natural. This work suggests that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are a substantial contributor to the observed warming, especially over the past 30 years. However, the accuracy of these estimates continues to be limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the climate response to external forcing.

The version that emerged from Shanghai concludes instead:

In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.

In point of fact, there may not have been any significant warming in the last 60 years. Moreover, such warming as may have occurred was associated with jumps that are inconsistent with greenhouse warming.

• The preparation of the report, itself, was subject to pressure. There were usually several people working on every few pages. Naturally there were disagreements, but these were usually hammered out in a civilized manner. However, throughout the drafting sessions, IPCC 'coordinators' would go around insisting that criticism of models be toned down, and that 'motherhood' statements be inserted to the effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their 'green' credentials in defense of their statements.

2

None of the above should be surprising. The IPCC was created to support the negotiations concerning CO2 emission reductions. Although the press frequently refers to the hundreds and even thousands of participants as the world's leading climate scientists, such a claim is misleading on several grounds. First, climate science, itself, has traditionally been a scientific backwater. There is little question that the best science students traditionally went into physics, math and, more recently, computer science. Thus, speaking of thousands' of the world's leading climate scientists is not especially meaningful. Even within climate science, most of the top researchers (at least in the US) avoid the IPCC because it is extremely time consuming and non-productive. Somewhat ashamedly I must admit to being the only active participant in my department. None of this matters a great deal to the IPCC. As a UN activity, it is far more important to have participants from a hundred countries— many of which have almost no active efforts in climate research. For most of these participants, involvement with the IPCC gains them prestige beyond what would normally be available, and these, not surprisingly, are likely to be particularly supportive of the IPCC. Finally, judging from the Citation Index, the leaders of the IPCC process like Sir John Houghton, Dr. Robert Watson, and Prof. Bert Bolin have never been major contributors to basic climate research. They are, however, enthu

siasts for the negotiating process without which there would be no IPCC, which is to say that the IPCC represents an interest in its own right. Of course, this hardly distinguishes the IPCC from other organizations.

The question of where do we go from here is an obvious and important one. From my provincial perspective, an important priority should be given to figuring out how to support and encourage science (and basic science underlying climate in particular) while removing incentives to promote alarmism. The benefits of leaving future generations a better understanding of nature would far outweigh the benefits (if any) of ill thought out attempts to regulate nature in the absence of such understanding. With respect to any policy, the advice given in the 1992 report of the NRC, Policy Implications of Greenhouse Warming, remains relevant: carry out only those actions which can be justified independently of any putative anthropogenic global warming. Here, I would urge that even such actions not be identified with climate unless they can be shown to significantly impact the radiative forcing of climate. On neither ground-independent justification or climatic relevance is Kyoto appropriate.

STATEMENT OF DR. JAYANT A. SATHAYE, SENIOR SCIENTIST, LAWRENCE LABORATORY,

BERKELEY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

NATIONAL

Dr. SATHAYE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me.

I am a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory operated by the University of California. I have worked as a Coordinating Lead Author of one of the chapters, the Third Assessment Report of the Third Working Group, and I have also served in a similar capacity on other IPCC reports over the last 7 years or so.

The main points that I want to make today deal with two segments, two time periods, one dealing with the reduction of nearterm annual greenhouse gas emissions, and the second dealing with the long-term stabilization of climate change. With regards to the near-term annual greenhouse gas emissions, the IPCC concluded that there were many technologies already available in the marketplace, which have the potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from 2010 to 2020 to levels below those of 2000 and this is something you pointed out, Mr. Chairman in your statement. About half of the reduction potential can be achieved with direct benefits, exceeding the direct cost, and the other half at a net direct cost of $100 per ton of carbon equivalent.

Now, this may seem somewhat optimistic and, indeed, if you tried to deploy these technologies in the marketplace you would encounter a number of different barriers, and these barriers include things like subsidized prices, world capital markets, lack of access to information and so forth, and we have a whole chapter in the IPCC that deals with just these issues. The implications of these barriers are that it will take time in order to implement the technologies that are available to us, and they will add to the cost of implementing these technologies as well.

Let me go on to talk about another aspect of the near-term cost, and this deals with a whole array of studies that have been done about the cost to various industrial economies if they were to meet the levels of emissions constraints specified in the Kyoto Protocol. The studies showed that the cost to the U.S. economy would range between 0.4 to 2 percent of the U.S. GDP in the year 2010.

Now, there are a number of ways the cost could be reduced and this, too, has been referred to earlier. One of the more important ways this cost could be reduced is through full emissions trading across industrialized countries. Just by that approach alone, these costs could be reduced by 50 percent, and we have experience with this, with sulphur dioxide trading within the United States and, indeed, that was a very effective approach to reducing sulphur dioxide emissions from power plants in the United States. But the cost can be further reduced if you pursue carbon dioxide projects in developing countries and also include land use change and forestry options in addition to other technologies.

Now, Dr. Lindzen just mentioned this question about pursuing approaches that also address other benefits that you might derive from mitigation actions and so if you pursue options that also reduce local pollutants, this could have a double or joint benefit whereby you achieve reductions in local pollutants as well as reduction of greenhouse gases.

Let me now turn to the second topic, which has to do with the stabilization of long-term atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. What the IPCC report concludes is that in this case as well, the technological options that we need in order to stabilize climate at levels of 450 parts per million, for instance, which is about 20 percent over the levels in the year 2000, those technological options are known as well, so we are not looking for exotic technologies in order to stabilize climate change if we decide that that is what we want to do over the long term.

In terms of the cost of achieving such stabilization, it will depend upon what stabilization level we pick as well as the emissions pathway to that stabilization level, and least-cost studies show that the lower the stabilization level, the more it will reach that level. The lower stabilization level means you begin earlier to decrease emissions as well.

Stabilization will require the participation of all countries. All IPCC emission scenarios show one trend consistently, that you cannot stabilize unless all countries participate in this process. The emission scenarios also indicate that conventional oil and gas resources will be severely depleted by mid-century or earlier. This is true for all emission scenarios that IPCC has looked at, and what this implies is that there will be an opportunity, or opportunities to shift or make a transition to less-carbon-intensive energy sources and technologies as the conventional oil and gas resources are depleted.

Finally, Mr. Chairman, in order to achieve these kinds of technological breakthroughs, investments in energy R&D, the transfer existing technologies is going to play a critical role not just in the United States but worldwide if climate is to be stabilized.

Let me also make a couple of remarks about the IPCC process. I think all of us here have participated in that process to some degree, and perhaps one thing that is probably worth clearing up is that the IPCC is engaged in reviews of studies, research studies that have already been done.

There is no new research being done within the IPCC work, and it is completely compatible with national governments, or national institutions carrying out research as mandated, or as required by

governments on their own, and I think this is important to remember, that if there was no research done, there would be nothing for the IPCC to review.

The second point about the IPCC is that we are providing information to negotiators, but we also are providing summarized information to all concerned. It is not just to the government, the negotiators. It goes to academics, it goes to students, and can be shared with everyone.

Lastly, you can do studies and nobody ever reads them, they go on bookshelves, and you can do studies in which the governments participate actively. In the IPCC process there is, indeed, some give-and-take, but we make sure that the content of the IPCC report remains in the summaries and, given that, I think there is a value to that process of consensus-building and pulling together this information in a summarized form.

Let me conclude with that, and thank you again, Mr. Chairman for inviting me.

[The prepared statement of Dr. Sathaye follows:]

PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. JAYANT A. SATHAYE1, SENIOR SCIENTIST, LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

SUMMARY

The IPCC WG III review of studies on climate change mitigation describes the potential and costs of technologies, practices, and policies to (1) reduce near-term annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and (2) stabilize atmospheric GHG concentrations over the long-term.

Reduction of Near-term Annual GHG Emissions:

1. Significant unanticipated technical progress relevant to greenhouse gas reductions has been achieved since the IPCC released its Second Assessment Report in 1996.

2. Technologies such as efficient hybrid engine cars, fuel cells, underground carbon dioxide storage, and many others have the potential to reduce global GHG emissions in 2010-2020 to below 2000 levels.

3. In the absence of barriers, studies suggest that about half of the above emissions reduction potential can be achieved with direct benefits exceeding direct costs, and the other half at a net direct cost of up to US $ 100/t Ceq (at 1998 prices). Overcoming barriers such as subsidized prices, lack of access to information and financing, and ill defined property rights will incur additional costs, which in some cases may be substantial.

4. National responses can be more effective if deployed as a portfolio of policy instruments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

5. About a dozen studies based on models of the global economy estimate that costs to the US economy of meeting GHG emissions levels noted in the Kyoto Protocol vary from 0.4-2.0% of 2010 GDP.

6. Assuming full GHG emissions trading both within and across industrialized countries, these studies show that costs can be reduced to less than half the above values.

7. Costs may be further reduced through implementation of carbon offset projects in developing countries, and land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities, mitigation options that also reduce local pollutants, and revenue neutral carbon taxes.

Stabilization of Long-term (2100+) Atmospheric GHG Concentrations:

8. Widespread use of known technological options could achieve a broad range of atmospheric carbon dioxide stabilization levels such as 550, 450 ppmv or below (compared to 368 ppmy in 2000) over the next 100 years or more, if the type of barriers noted in item 3 above could be overcome.

9. The cost of achieving stabilization will depend on the emissions pathway and the targeted stabilization level. Least-cost studies show that decreasing the stabilization target makes annual emissions peak earlier and at lower levels before be

1The remarks in this statement represent my personal views, and not necessarily those of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory or the University of California.