the toxic dinoflagelate gymnodinium breve shows its development in the warm, oad shallows of the Gulf of Mexico, and its transport in the Gulf Stream system far as North Carolina, where it has come to shore.

A major outbreak of cholera developed in coastal Peru, during an extended el niño ent in 1991, and thereafter quickly appeared to neighboring countries. In the first weeks, 30,000 cases and 114 deaths were reported. Cholera lives dormant in the a as vibrio cholerae, associating itself with mucous membranes of the copepod. ere is an apparent relationship between warm sea-surface temperature and chola there and in Bangladesh. The association of climate with disease is thus plaule, yet there are several possible routes, for el niño rainfall alters sanitation on ore as well as disturbing and warming the coastal ocean.

Cholera is a disease that may illustrate the association of virulence with transission rate. In evolutionary biology, Paul Ewald of Amherst College argues that olera and many slowly developing human diseases have evolved so as to maximize eir own transmission. Thus, with poor sanitation in the under-developed world, olera is rapidly transmitted and very virulent. In countries with good sanitation olera exists in a much more benign strain, adapted to very slow transmission. nis message suggests that global climate change and human activity (like introducon of 'exotic' species by ship traffic) both could conspire to increase the virulence toxic viruses and bacteria in the environment.

There is a tension throughout this debate on global change, between advocates of blic health, social infrastructure, economics of the recovery on the one hand, and vocates of mitigation of climate change (and its role in disease), and environental science, on the other. Regardless of the balance struck in resolution of this bate, there is value in observing our environment, predicting its future, AND asssing its current behavior.

New technologies. A remarkable chain of technological discovery has focused on servations of the global environment. These are moored and drifting and self-prolled vehicles in the ocean, with a range of sensors for physical, biological and emical substances; orbiting satellites that probe both oceans and atmosphere; seaor and moored 'observatories' that allow us to 'explore in time' as well as space. he importance of establishing long-term measurement sites for climate studies canot be overstated (the TAO array of moorings in the Pacific, perhaps the largest scitific instrument ever built, has shown us the inner workings of el niño). Molecular ology gives a remarkable tool for studying the function and evolution of ecostems. Computer models of the climate system have become the centerpiece for eas and observations, and computing power continues to increase steadily (though metimes delayed by political constraints).

These new sensors and platforms give us eyes for viewing climate, computers and e internet give us a global central nervous system, but we also need the will to serve and understand the environment as it is assaulted by accelerating natural d human-induced change.

Salinity Median

Evidence of a red tide on the West Florida Shelf: Nov 1978, red = chlorophyll a> 3 μg/l (Florida Marine Inst.)

Northern Atlantic (Labrador Sea) salinity at three depths (2000m, 3500m, 1500m top to bottom). Salinity declines as fresh water input at the surface has increased with intense, cold forcing by the North Atlantic Oscillation. I. Yashayaev, J. Lazier Bedford Inst. of Oceanography, P. Rhines (Univ. of Washington)

Dissolved nitrate in the Atlantic Ocean, along a section from Antarctica (left) to Ic land. High concentrations of this nutrient occur deep in the ocean, and in the Sout ern Ocean. Near the surface nitrate is almost absent, evidence of active ecosyste: growth at the top of the ocean. The global ocean circulation must bring nitrate u to the surface, and controls the distribution of life (WOCE program).

CLIMATE POLICY-FROM RIO TO KYOTO: A POLITICAL ISSUE FOR 2000-AND BEYOND Hoover Institution Essay by S. Fred Singer

xecutive Summary

Within the United States, global warming and related policy issues are becoming creasingly contentious, surfacing in the presidential contests of the year 2000 and eyond. They enter into controversies involving international trade agreements, estions of national sovereignty versus global governance, and ideological debates bout the nature of future economic growth and development. On a more detailed vel, determined efforts are under way by environmental groups and their sympaizers in foundations and in the federal government to restrict and phase out the se of fossil fuels (and even nuclear reactors) as sources of energy. Such measures ould reduce greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere but also effectively eindustrialize the United States.

International climate policy is based on the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which calls on dustrialized nations to carry out, within one decade, drastic cuts in the emission greenhouse gases (GHG) that stem mainly from the burning of fossil fuels. The rotocol is ultimately based on the 1996 Scientific Assessment Report issued by the tergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. advisory body. The PCC's main conclusion, featured in its Summary for Policymakers (SPM), states at "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global cliate." This widely quoted, innocuous-sounding but ambiguous phrase has been misterpreted by many to mean that climate disasters will befall the world unless rong action is taken immediately to cut GHG emissions.

This essay documents the inadequate science underlying the IPCC conclusions, aces how these conclusions were misinterpreted in 1996, and how this led to the yoto Protocol. I also discuss some fatal shortcomings of the Protocol and the polital and ideological forces driving it.

The IPCC conclusion is in many ways a truism. There certainly must be a human fluence on some features of the climate, locally if not globally. The important queson-the focus of scientific debate is whether the available evidence supports the esults of calculations from the current General Circulation Models (GCMs). Unless alidated by the climate record, the predictions of future warming based on theoetical models cannot be relied on. As demonstrated in this essay, GCMs are not ole to account for observed climate variations, which are presumably of natural orin, for the following reasons:

1. To begin with, GCMs assume that the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide will continue its increase (at a greater rate than is actually observed) and will more than double in the next century. Many experts doubt that this will ever happen, as the world proceeds on a path of ever-greater energy efficiency and as low-cost fossil fuels become depleted and therefore more costly.

2. Next, one must assume that global temperatures will really rise to the extent calculated by the conventional theoretical climate models used by the IPCC. Observations suggest that any warming will be minute, will occur mainly at night and in winter, and will therefore be inconsequential. The failure of the present climate models is likely due to their inadequate treatment of atmospheric processes, such as cloud formation and the distribution of water vapor (which is the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere).

3. The putative warming has been labeled as greater and more rapid than anything experienced in human history. But a variety of historical data contradicts this apocalyptic statement. As recently as 1,000 years ago, during the "Medieval climate optimum," Vikings were able to settle Greenland. Even higher temperatures were experienced about 7,000 years ago during the much-studied climate optimum.'

The IPCC's Summary for Policymakers tries hard to minimize the inadequacy of e GCMs to model atmospheric processes and reproduce the observed climate varitions. For example, the SPM does not reveal the fact that weather satellite data, e only truly global data we have, do not show the expected atmospheric warming end; the existence of satellites is not even mentioned.

The scientific evidence for a presumed "human influence" is spurious and based ostly on the selective use of data and choice of particular time periods. Phrases at stress the uncertainties of identifying human influences were edited out of the pproved final draft before the IPCC report was printed in May 1996.

A further misrepresentation occurred in July 1996 when politicians, intent on esblishing a Kyoto-like regime of mandatory emission controls, took the deceptively orded phrase about "discernible human influence" and linked it to a catastrophic