would become more serious. A sea-level rise of 1 m would threaten certain coastal areas-for example, the Japanese coastal zone, on which 50 per cent of Japan's industrial production is located (e.g., Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya); in addition, about 90 per cent of the remaining sandy beaches in Japan would be in danger of disappearing.

Human Health: Heat-stress mortality and illness (predominantly cardiorespiratory) are projected to more than double by 2050 resulting from an increase in the frequency or severity of heat waves under climate-change conditions projected by a transient GCM (GFDL X2, UKMO X6). Net climate changerelated increases in the geographic distribution (elevation and latitude) of the vector organisms of infectious diseases (e.g., malarial mosquitoes, schistosome-spreading snails) and changes in the life-cycle dynamics of vectors and infective parasites would, in aggregate, increase the potential transmission of many vector-borne diseases. Increases in nonvector-borne infectious diseases such as cholera, salmonellosis and other food- and water-related infections-also could occur because of climatic impacts on water distribution, temperature and micro-organism proliferation. Disease surveillance could be strengthened and integrated with other environmental monitoring to design early warning systems; develop early, environmentally sound public health interventions; and develop anticipatory societal policies to reduce the risk of outbreaks and subsequent spread of epidemics.

Conclusions: The major impacts in Temperate Asia under global climate change are projected to be large shifts of the boreal forests, the disappearance of significant portions of mountain glaciers and water supply shortages. The most critical uncertainty in these estimates stems from the lack of credible projections of the hydrological cycle under global climate change scenarios. The effects of climate change on the Asian monsoon and the ENSO phenomenon are among the major uncertainties in the modeling of the hydrological cycle. Projections of agricultural crop yields are uncertain, not only because of the uncertainty in the hydrological cycle but also because of the potential positive effects of CO2 and production practices. Sea-level rise endangers sandy beaches in the coastal zones, but remains an anthropogenically induced problem in delta areas. Integrated impact studies considering multi-stress factors are needed.

Tropical Asia is physiographically diverse and ecologically rich in natural and crop-related biodiversity. The present total population of the region is about 1.6 billion, and it is projected to increase to 2.4 billion by 2025. The population is principally rural-based, although in 1995, the region included 6 of the 25 largest cities in the world. The climate in Tropical Asia is characterized by seasonal weather patterns associated with the two monsoons and the occurrence of tropical cyclones in the three core areas of cyclogenesis (the Bay of Bengal, north Pacific Ocean and South China Sea). Climate change will add to other stresses such as rapid urbanization, industrialization

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and economic development, which contribute to unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, increased pollution, land degradation and other environmental problems.

Ecosystems: Substantial elevational shifts of ecosystems in the mountains and uplands of Tropical Asia are projected. At high elevation, weedy species can be expected to displace tree species-though the rates of vegetation change could be slow compared to the rate of climate change and constrained by increased erosion in the Greater Himalayas. Changes in the distribution and health of rainforest and drier monsoon forest will be complex. In Thailand, for instance, the area of tropical forest could increase from 45 per cent to 80 per cent of total forest cover, whereas in Sri Lanka, a significant increase in dry forest and a decrease in wet forest could occur. Projected increases in evapotranspiration and rainfall variability are likely to have a negative impact on the viability of freshwater wetlands, resulting in shrinkage and desiccation. Sea-level rise and increases in sea-surface temperature are the most probable major climate change-related stresses on coastal ecosystems. Coral reefs may be able to keep up with the rate of sea-level rise but suffer bleaching from higher temperatures. Landward migration of mangroves and tidal wetlands is expected to be constrained by human infrastructure and human activities.

Hydrology and Water Resources: The Himalayas have a critical role in the provision of water to continental monsoon Asia. Increased temperatures and increased seasonal variability in precipitation are expected to result in increased recession of glaciers and increasing danger from glacial lake outburst floods. A reduction in average flow of snow-fed rivers, coupled with an increase in peak flows and sediment yield, would have major impacts on hydropower generation, urban water supply and agriculture. Availability of water from snow-fed rivers may increase in the short term but decrease in the long run. Runoff from rain-fed rivers may change in the future. A reduction in snowmelt water will put the dry-season flow of these rivers under more stress than is the case now. Increased population and increasing demand in the agricultural, industrial and hydropower sectors will put additional stress on water resources. Pressure on the drier river basins and those subject to low seasonal flows will be most acute. Hydrological changes in island and coastal drainage basins are expected to be relatively small in comparison to those in continental Tropical Asia, apart from those associated with sea-level rise.

Food and Fiber Production: The sensitivity of major cereal and tree crops to changes in temperature, moisture and CO2 concentration of the magnitudes projected for the region has been demonstrated in many studies. For instance, impacts on rice yield, wheat yield and sorghum yield suggest that any increase in production associated with CO2 fertilization will be more than offset by reductions in yield from temperature or moisture changes. Although climate change impacts could result in significant changes in crop yields, production, storage and distribution, the net effect of the changes regionwide is uncertain because of varietal differences; local differences in growing season, crop management, etc.; the lack of inclusion

The headlines a year and a half ago positively brimmed with assurance: "Global Warming: No Longer in Doubt," "Man Adversely Affecting Climate,, Experts Conclude," "Experts Agree Humans Have 'Discernible' Effect on Climate," "Climate Panel Is Confident of Man's Link to Warming." The official summary statement of the UNsponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that had prompted the headlines seemed reasonably confident, too: "... the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on global climate." But as negotiators prepare to gather in Bonn in July to discuss a climate treaty that could require nations to adopt expensive policies for limiting their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, many climate experts caution that it is not at all clear yet that human activities have begun to warm the planet-or how bad greenhouse warming will be when it arrives.

What had inspired the media excitement was the IPCC's conclusion

computer climate modeling. The models are key to detecting the arrival of global warming, because they enable researchers to predict how the planet's climate should respond to increasing levels of greenhouse gases. And while predicting climate has always been an uncertain business, some scientists assert that developments since the IPCC completed its report have, if anything, magnified the uncertainties. "Global warming is definitely a threat as greenhouse-gas levels increase," says climate modeler David Rind of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, "but I

"In the climate system, there are 14 orders of magnitude of scale, from the planetary scale-which is 40 million meters down to the scale of one of the little aerosol particles on which water vapor can change phase to a liquid [cloud particle]-which is a fraction of a millionth of a millimeter."

Of these 14 orders of magnitude, notes Schlesinger. researchers are able to include in their models only the two largest, the planetary scale and the scale of weather disturbances "To go to the third scale-which is [that of thunderstorms] down around 50kilometers resolution-we need a computer

that the half-degree rise in global temperature since the late 19th century may bear a "fingerprint" of human activity. The patchy distribution of the warming around the globe looks much like the distinctive pattern expected if the heat-trapping gases being poured into the atmosphere were beginning to warm the planet, the report said. But IPCC scientists now say that neither the public nor many scientists appreciate how many if's, and's, and but's peppered the report. "It's unfortunate that many people read the media hype before they read the (IPCC) chapter" on the detection of greenhouse warming, says climate modeler Benjamin Santer of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, the lead author of the chapter. "I think the caveats are there. We say quite clearly that few scientists would say the attribution issue was a done deal."

Santer and his IPCC colleagues' overriding reason for stressing the caveats is their understanding of the uncertainty inherent in

myself am not convinced that we have (gained] greater confidence" in recent years in our predictions of greenhouse warming. Says one senior climate modeler who prefers not to enter the fray publicly: "The more vou learn, the more you understand that you don't understand very much." Indeed. most modelers now agree that the climate models will not be able to link greenhouse warming unambiguously to human actions for a decade or more.

The effort to simulate climate in a computer faces two kinds of obstacles: lack of computer power and a still very incomplete picture of how real-world climate works. The climate forecasters' basic strategy is to build a mathematical model that recreates global climate processes as closely as possible, let the model run, and then test it by comparing the results to the historical climate record. But even with today's powerful supercomputers, that is a daunting challenge, says modeler Michael Schlesinger of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:

a thousand times faster, a teraflops machine that maybe we'll have in 5 years." And including the smallest scales, he says. would require 1036 to 1037 more computer power. "So we're kind of stuck."

To get unstuck, modelers "parameterize" smaller scale processes known to affect climate, from the formation of clouds to the movement of ocean eddies. Because they can't model, say, every last cloud over North America, modelers specify the temperatures and humidities that will spawn different types of clouds. If those conditions hold within a single gnd box-the horizontal square that represents the model's finest level of detail-the computer counts the entire area as cloudy. But as modelers point out. the grid used in today's models-typically a 300-kilometer square-is still very coarse. One over the state of Oregon, for instance. would take in the coastal ocean. the low coast ranges, the Willamette Valley, the high Cascades. and the desert of the Great Basin.

Having the computer power to incorporate into the models a more detailed picture of clouds wouldn't eliminate uncertainties, however, because researchers are still hotly debating the overall impact of clouds on future climate. In today's climate, the net effect of clouds is to cool the planet-although they trap some heat, they block even more by reflecting sunlight back into space. How that balance would change under greenhouse warming, no one knows. A few years ago, a

agricultural burning all reflect sunlightshading and cooling the surface beneath them. Including this aerosol effect in four independent climate models at three centers-Livermore, the Hadley Center, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI) in Hamburg, Germany-produced geographic patterns of temperature changes that resembled those observed in the real world over the past few decades, such as the greater warming of land than ocean

Fingerprinting work since then has only strengthened the confidence of IPCC's more confident scientists that greenhouse warming has arrived. "I've worked with the models enough to know they're not perfect, but we keep getting the same answer," says Tim P. Barnett, a climatologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a co-author of the IPCC chapter. Another climatologist and IPCC contributor, Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station, is similarly heartened. "I'm pretty optimistic about climate modeling. I don't know anybody doing [fingerprinting] who is not finding the same result."

ing to Christopher Folland of the Hadley Center. Folland and his colleagues have been trying to sort out what was behind the intermittent warming of recent decades, which in the third quarter of the century was more rapid in the Southern than Northern Hemisphere. Earlier work by Santer and a dozen other colleagues showed an increasing resemblance between the observed pattern of warming through 1987, the end of their temperature record, and the results of a model run that incorporated aerosol effects. The researchers suggested that the North's more abundant pollutant aerosols could have been moderating the warming there from greenhouse gases. But when Folland

But the assumptions about how hazes affect climate may have taken a hit recently from climatologist and modeler James Hansen of NASA's GISS-the man who told Congress in 1988 that he believed "with a high degree of confidence" that greenhouse warming had arrived. In a recent paper, Hansen and his GISS colleagues pointed out that recent measurements suggest that aerosols don't just cool; they also warm the atmosphere by absorbing sunlight. The net effect of this reflection and absorption, Hansen estimates, would be small-too small to have much effect on temperature.

Hansen and his colleagues conclude that aerosols probably do have a large effect on climate, but indirectly, through clouds. By increasing the number of droplets in a cloud, aerosols can amplify the reflectivity of clouds, and thus may have an overall cooling effect on the atmosphere. If true, this would greatly complicate the modelers' work, because meteorologists are only just starting to understand how efficiently particles of different sizes and compositions modify clouds. "I used to think of clouds as the Gordian knot of the problem." says cloud specialist V. Ramanathan of Scripps. "Now I think it's the aerosols. We are arguing about everything."

compared the results of his model run with a longer, more recent temperature record, the resemblance that had been building into the 1980s faded by the early 1990s. Contrarian Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, also has pointed out this trend.

The Hadley model suggests that "there appears to be more than one reason" for the variations, says Folland. The waning of aerosols as pollution controls took effect probably helped the North catch up, he says, but so did natural shifts in atmospheric circulation that tended to warm the continents (Science, 7 February, p. 754). Most provocatively, Folland and his colleagues are suggesting that a shift in North Atlantic Ocean circulation that has tended to warm the region also has contributed. "There's no doubt," says Santer. "that multiple natural and anthropogenic factors can contribute, and probably have, to the interhemispheric temperature contrast. We've learned something about detection."

All of which only adds to the skepticism of scientists who might be called the "silent doubters": meteorologists and climate modelers who rarely give voice to their concerns and may not have participated even peripherally in the IPCC. "There really isn't a per

And the complications don't stop with the multiplication of aerosol effects, accord

suasive case being made" for detection of greenhouse warming, argues Brian Farrell of Harvard University, who runs models to understand climate change in the geologic past. Farrell has no quarrel with the IPCC chapter on detecting greenhouse warming, but he says the executive summary did not "convey the real uncertainties the science has." He further contends that if IPCC scientists had had real confidence in their assertion that global warming had arrived, they would have stated with more precision how sensitive the climate system is to greenhouse gases. But the IPCC left the estimate of the warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide at 1.5°C to 4.5°C. where it has been for 20 years. "That's an admission that the error bars are as big as the signal," says Farrell.

Climate modeler Max Suarez of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, agrees that it's "iffy" whether the match between models and temperature records is close enough to justify saying that greenhouse warming is already under way. "Especially if you're trying to explain the very small (temperature] change we've seen already," he says, "I certainly wouldn't trust the models to that level of detail yet."

Rather than dwelling on model imperfections, IPCC co-author Barnett emphasizes some of the things that current models are doing fairly well-simulating present and past climates and the changing seasons, predicting El Niño a year ahead, and producing good simulations of decades-long climate variations. But he agrees that too much confidence has been read into the IPCC summary statement. "The next 10 years will tell; we're going to have to wait that long to really see," he says. Klaus Hasselmann of the MPI also sees a need to wait. He and his colleagues "think we can see the [greenhouse warming] signal now with 97% confidence." But, as North notes, "all that assumes you knew what you were doing to start with in building the models. Hasselmann has taith in his model but recognizes that his faith is not universally shared. "The signal is not so much above the noise that you can convince skeptics," he observes. "It will take another decade or so to work up out of the noise."

That's no excuse for complacency, many climate scientists say. Basic theory, this century's warming, and geologic climate records all suggest that increasing carbon dioxide will warm the planet. "I'd be surprised if that went away," says Suarez, as would most climate researchers. North suggests that while researchers are firming up the science, policy-makers could inaugurate "some cautious things" to moderate any warming. The last thing he and his colleagues want is a rash of headlines saving the threat is over.

-Richard A. Kerr