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The Rice Thresher
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by Rebecca Vigen for the thresher Experts on protecting the global environment discussed causes and consequences of global warming at the conference "Global Warming: Science and Policy" held Sept. 6-8. The James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy hosted the conference, which was planned to bring scientists, policy makers and economists together and to expose them to other perspectives, Baker Institute Associate Director Richard Stoll said. "You have the science people talking about various things relating to the geological record on one hand, [and] on the other hand, you have people that are actually involved or have been involved in making policy talking about global warming from that perspective," Stoll said. Stoll said faculty members were key in the organization of the conference. "It is a subject of controversy, and there were several Rice faculty members who very much wanted to put together a fairly comprehensive conference on this issue," he said. The keynote speakers stretched from the world of science to the world of policy. Neal Lane, assistant to the president for science and technology, discussed in the first keynote speech the presidential initiatives undertaken by the Clinton administration to slow the process of global warming. Lane, a former Rice provost and physics professor, encouraged scientists to communicate to the public so that sounder policies can be adopted. Assistant Secretary of State for Europe Richard Burt spoke of United States' leadership in the international effort to protect the environment and remarked that international agencies are not equipped to take on the problem. U.S. Senator Charles Hagel (R-Neb.) compared global warming to insurance, suggesting that the more citizens pay now, the better off they will be in the future. The Sept. 8 keynote speaker was 1996 Nobel Prize winner and Rice Chemistry Professor Robert Curl, who emphasized the need for consensus rather than polarization. Curl also spoke of the dilemma of individual states not assuming the same responsibility for sustaining the global environment. While the participants in the conference agreed that global warming is happening, there is much debate as to how much is occurring and how much is due to industrialization. According to Lane, the global temperature has risen one degree over the past 100 years and will rise 5-25 degrees in the next 100 years resulting in the melting of ice caps, flooding, more dramatic weather conditions, rising sea levels and many other consequences. Baker Institute Director Edward Djerejian ended the conference by highlighting the general consensus and as well as the specific disagreements of the participants. He said that better equipment is necessary to create better environmental models, and further research is needed on the difference in temperature between different places in the atmosphere, the effects of oceans as heat reservoirs and the role of cosmic rays, the sun and clouds. Stoll called the conference a success. "For example, there was consensus among the scientists on a number of the important issues, and on others, I think it became much clearer what the range of disagreement is, which helps point the way about whether further research should go," Stoll said. Stoll said he understood also that students might have had a hard time making it to the conference, held from Wednesday to Friday. "It certainly would have been difficult for students to attend the whole thing - that is, to skip class for two and a half days." He also said that students may not have physically participated in the conference, but may have still taken interest. "On the other hand, we know the Web site was saturated, and we have every reason to believe that for some of the panels, people were watching back in their rooms." The conference was open to Rice faculty, staff and students.
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