Today's New Yorker contains the third and final part of Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent series on climate change. After discussing the effects of global warming on sensitive but important environments like the Arctic and Antarctic in the first installation, and the devastating effects of climate change on past civilizations in the second, she discusses the technologies and politics associated with the issues this week, including the Bush Administration's resistance to acknowledging that there is even a problem to address. Very interesting reading and I strongly encourage the interested party to check it out.

Ms. Kolbert argues that we cannot reverse the warming trend that has already begun because carbon dioxide is a long-lived gas. All that we have the power to do is to try to mitigate the effects of climate change by reducing emissions. The longer we wait to do this, the riskier the situation will become.

For more than twenty-five years now, scientists have been warning about the dangers of global warming, and in that time the U.S. has not cut emissions but has actually increased its energy usage and, with it, dramatically increased the production of greenhouse gases. Although there are a great number of uncertainties about how, exactly, global warming will play out - how much sea levels will rise, where precisely there is likely to be drought, and so on - none of those uncertainties alter the basic fact that the more we increase greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere the hotter the planet will become. The only way to mitigate that is to curb our emissions. It's pretty basic.

Early in his first term, President Bush withdrew the U.S. from negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty that deals with greenhouse-gas emissions. The President also has rejected any kind of mandatory domestic CO2 curbs, like those proposed by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. Without some kind of curb or tax on greenhouse-gas emissions, it's hard to imagine how they will be controlled. There's simply no incentive.

The administration's claim that more research is needed before they can act is often used as excuse for the fact that they don't want to act. After all, curbing emissions isn't easy. Practically every activity of modern life - from driving and flying to turning on the lights - produces greenhouse gases.

We're all responsible, myself included. In the U.S., the average new car gets about 20 miles to the gallon. If that new car gets driven 100,000 miles, it will release almost 43 metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere. Bringing it home, my '99 Jeep Cherokee is now getting about 16 mpg. At 80,000 miles, I've probably contributed my 43 metric tons by now just by driving that one car. Plus whatever my leafblower contributes.

Some opponents of the Kyoto accord argue that it is unfair to America, because it asks us to limit emissions but does not ask the same of the developing world - China, for instance, which is poised to become a major producer of greenhouse gases. However, if the U.S., which is by far the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, does not curb its emissions first, how can we persuade the Chinese, who are in the process of ramping up their CO2 production, to take similar steps? If we continue to increase our emissions, then why should the Chinese, who still have a much lower standard of living than we do, bother to curb theirs? When Kyoto was drafted, it was always understood to be just a first step. Since the U.S. is been unwilling to take even that first step, it's hard to see how any progress will ever be made.

Disturbingly, Ms. Kolbert reminds us that earlier this year, Senator James Imhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, gave a speech on the Senate floor titled "An Update on the Science of Climate Change." In the speech, Sen. Imhofe announced that "new evidence" had come to light that "makes a mockery" of the notion that human-induced warming is occurring. Sen. Imhofe, who has called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," went on to argue that this important new evidence was being suppressed by "alarmists" who view anthropogenic warming as "an article of faith." One of the authorities that Sen. Imhofe repeatedly cited in support of his claims was the fiction writer Michael Crichton.