Climate change expert Robert Kates writes in the most recent Maine Policy Review that global warming “is occurring. Its effects are already observable, it will likely increase, and most of it will be due to increased greenhouse gasses. … The costs of preventing warming are mixed and the appropriate timing of such efforts is unknown, requiring well-planned pilot studies and experiments to clarify.”

Dr. Kates of Trenton is a review editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and part of the international 2,000-scientist effort to assess climate change and its potential impact and address actions that might be taken. Consider his comments in the policy review, from UMaine’s Margaret Chase Smith Center, in light of the recent stalemate at last week’s U.N. conference at the Hague on global warming.

Dr. Kates joins the large majority of scientists who conclude global warming exists but is properly cautious about what its specific effects are and is even more circumspect about remedial action. Given that a fair part of the world’s economy is based on the fossil-fuel gobbling industries that are the culprits in the human contribution to climate change, this highly complex problem deserves that level of caution.

The U.N. conference stalled, technically, over whether the United States – the world’s biggest greenhouse gas producer – could count forests and well-managed farmland as “sinks,” that would absorb carbon dioxide. Allowing these sinks to count would mean that U.S. industries could meet targeted emission levels without making cuts nearly as severe as would be otherwise necessary. A compromise offer in the closing hours at the conference failed to gain European support.

The disagreement, however, runs much deeper than sinks. A fundamental question of control emerges amid the uncertain effects and costs of climate change: Among developed nations, will a European model, heavy on government, be more effective, or does the U.S. approach, more likely to include the concerns of industry, better address the worldwide but largely unknown influences of climate change? One guess might be that the European model is more effective in creating formal agreements, but that the U.S. model is more effective in carrying them out. An example of this split can be seen in the Kyoto Protocol, a global-warming document agreed to by 170 nations in 1997 that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels. But it turned out to be one thing for government officials to agree on an international stage to these cuts and quite another to gain support at home. To date, no industrialized nation has signed the pact.

In discussing the costs of climate change in his review article, Dr. Kates points out that that individuals may be able to adapt in some areas to the effects of global warming, but broader actions are likely necessary. “Much adaptation has and will take place more or less spontaneously,” he writes, “such as trying to plant crops here in Maine knowing that, in most years, we have ten more frost free days in our growing season. But while some will adapt, many can’t do so without help; individuals can hardly build sea walls by themselves against rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges.”

Knowing when individuals or individual nations can act on their own and then letting them may be the key to finding an international agreement that is something more than just a signed document. Or, as the U.N. conference shows, coming away with nothing at all.