Editor’s Note:

Globally accepted research tells us unequivocally that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most prominent greenhouse gas (GHG). The rising man-made production of GHGs in the last 150 years or so has resulted in a measurable increase in the average temperature of the planet.

Global warming, as this effect has been dubbed, is driving a change in the Earth's climate.

However, despite mounting evidence of global warming and climate change, the United States officially has been reluctant to push for major GHG reductions. But this month President George Bush surprised everyone with a call for a comprehensive CO2 emission reduction plan by the end of 2008 for the world's top emitters. Is the Bush plan real or is it political hot air?

In this edition of the Faculty Q&A, mathematician and climate scientist Andrei Kirilenko, one of the authors of this year's International Panel on Climate Change report, talks with Office of University Relations writer Juan Miguel Pedraza about the Bush plan, climate change, and what the prospects are for meaningfully reducing GHG emissions. Kirilenko is an associate professor in the UND School of Aerospace Sciences Department of Earth System Science and Policy.

Kirilenko worked on "nuclear winter"-related climate change simulations at the Russian Academy of Sciences, where he got his PhD. At UND Kirilenko-continuing the international collaborative research he started at Purdue University-develops mathematical models to predict climate change effects on natural resources such as forests, on agriculture, and on insects.

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OUR: Europeans believe that they hold the "moral high ground" in the GHG debate because, even with 100 million more people than the United States, they emit a lot less CO2. European leaders say the Bush Administration's new proposal for a global CO2 reduction is lame and not nearly strong enough to accomplish much in terms of global warming.

What's your view of the Bush plan?

AK: I'm a mathematician, not a political scientist, but personally, I see the Bush proposal as a positive move. It's a clear signal that Washington gets it, that climate change is real, that something needs to be done about it. The White House plan uses numbers produced by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration.

This proposal actually comes at very interesting time (in the global climate change debate). The Kyoto Protocol-which the United States did not participate in-suggested that within the time period 2008-12, the world's industrial nations should decrease production of CO2 on average by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels. This is the framework.

After that, Kyoto Protocol expires, so we now are seeing extensive international consultation on what to do next after the Kyoto Protocol ceases to exist. As a matter of fact, Kyoto was supposed to be only the first step, a pilot project, if you will, in the global efforts to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere.

At the meeting of the G8 (major industrial) nations in Germany this month, the major topic is climate change. They're preparing the road for the United Nations climate change conference in Bali in December. This meeting will bring together the largest industrialized nations and the largest developing nations (China and India) to start preparing the new phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which may be called the Bali Protocol.

OUR: The European Union says it has a better CO2 reduction plan than the Bush Administration. Can you tell us about this?

AK: The EU suggests a hard-wired goal of bringing the estimated global temperature increase into the 2 degree C corridor by 2100. In other words, they're calling for strict limits on the increase in temperature. That's an aggressive plan, and it will require a lot of international cooperation.

That's directly tied to the Kyoto Protocol emission reduction targets; those targets are usually relative to the 1990 global rate of GHG release into the atmosphere.

Every country that participates in Kyoto Protocol gets its own target, and altogether those targets amount to an overall 5.2 percent reduction compared with 1990 levels. That means GHG emission reductions of up to 25 percent for more industrialized countries while some less-developed countries get to increase their emissions by as much as 10 percent so that they can bump up their economic output.

Ultimately, the new post-Kyoto plan is to reduce GHG release by 50 percent by the year 2050-that's a huge commitment.

OUR: Where does the Bush plan fit into this global emission reduction regime?

AK: President Bush is proposing a new framework among industrialized nations-the 10 to 15 major economies that produce 80 percent of the world's total carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

OUR: How do we know who would be doing what with respect to global warming?

AK: It's kind of hard to emit CO2 in large quantities without detection. For example, we can compute CO2 emissions from the amount and efficiency of a country's power, or electricity, generation. Such computations will give you right away and fairly precisely what that country's emissions are.

OUR: What's the difference between the Kyoto Protocol and the earlier international agreement to reduce ozone-damaging emissions of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons-gases primarily used in automotive and other air-conditioning systems and in products such as shaving cream)?

AK: The global CFC agreement was a major effort in international cooperation, perhaps the first of its kind, and it's been sort of effective. There's still a lot of work to be done there. However, a lot more needs to be done with GHGs; among scientists who study this, we joke that if carbon dioxide were a stinky, nontransparent gas, then people would quickly adopt the means to regulate it. But because we can't smell it and we can't see it, it seems likes it's hard for people to believe that large amounts of this gas are being emitted.

The big problem is that CO2 is a gas with a very long residence period in the atmosphere.

Yes, the entire turnover of naturally occurring CO2 is relatively fast and pretty balanced. However, the sink, or flow, back into the biosphere or the ocean of the CO2 that we add into the atmosphere takes hundreds of years.

Moreover, even though we're adding this CO2 into the atmosphere today, the actual climate change impacts from these additions won't be apparent for 20 to 30 years, which means that the effects of today's emissions are beyond the borders of our normal human thinking in terms of time frames.

OUR: Is there one particular strategy that will help us achieve effective climate change goals?

AK: Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet.

Political leaders tend to think about climate change-and what to do about it-in terms of economics: is it more effective to control the release of GHG or will climate change be more harmful to industry, households, agriculture. In other words, which strategy-do something or do nothing-will be worse for our economy. Clearly, we will see more negative effects if we do nothing, but I hope to live to see some positive changes.

So to answer your question in another way, we're better off spending money on adaptations to changing climate as well as on the mitigation, or reduction, of climate change. The most cost-effective approach will be some combination-as yet to be determined-of these strategies.

I'm optimistic because we have a new Congress that is very active in environmental issues, especially climate change.

I noticed that (Speaker of the House and California Democrat) Nancy Pelosi was blogging a few weeks ago on Yahoo groups, asking the public for their thoughts about global climate change and how should Congress react to it; there've been similar signals from the Senate, and now from the Bush Administration.

I think we now all realize that there's a problem.