According to a report issued last week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the strange things going on at the Leopold Reserve are not isolated. Researchers found that more than 80 percent of the 500 species studied — including birds, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, plants, mollusks, insects and other invertebrates — are changing in response to rising temperatures. Some birds are migrating up to three weeks earlier now; other animals are migrating outside their natural habitat, edging closer to the poles and living at higher altitudes.

“There’s no doubt there will be extinction,” says Terry Root, the University of Michigan professor who led the research. “Because you have species that have small ranges, a lot of them won’t be able to move quickly [enough] since the temperature is rising so fast.”

The researchers who conducted the analysis of more than 44 studies on the topic say this can create a slew of problems since not all birds, for example, are changing their migration pattern. Some birds, previously thought to migrate in response to day length — the hours of light in a given day — are now believed to cue to temperature instead. Root says the ones still responding to day length may end up arriving at a habitat where other bird species have already set up shop. This could make it difficult for them to find a spot to nest, possibly setting off a whole set of other complications.

In January the IPCC released the first installment of its study, which focused on the science of global warming and predicted that the earth’s atmosphere could warm up by 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit during the next 100 years. But this latest report devotes many of its 1,000 pages to a hard look at the damage that global warming has already caused. For example, as ice packs break up, polar bears will have a more difficult time stalking their prey and feeding, since seals will no longer need breathing holes to get air. It also forecasts that, as temperatures rise, there will be more deaths from heat stress, as well as an increase in the number of people exposed to vector- and water-borne diseases like malaria and cholera. The report also predicts decreased water for those living in the subtropics, and more flooding in many low-lying areas, like Bangladesh, as sea levels continue to rise.

“What we’re seeing is movement into uncharted territory, into a warmer state that we have not known for the last 450,000 or perhaps up to a million years,” says James McCarthy, professor of oceanography at Harvard University and co-chairman of the IPCC panel that issued the report. “So it will take many organisms into a condition they haven’t been in.”

Researchers say that we can learn a lot about our own fate by studying global warming’s effect on different animal and plant species.

“It’s sort of an early warning system,” says Jeff Price, director of climate change impact studies at the American Bird Conservancy and co-author of the report. “You know the cliché of the canary in the coal mine — if the canary croaked, the miners knew to get out in a hurry. Plants and wildlife are barometers for the environment,” Price says.

In the Northern Hemisphere, satellite images show that spring is beginning about 11 days earlier than it did about 50 years ago. Warblers, Baltimore orioles and robins — spring-migrating birds — are procreating earlier than they did three decades ago. The clock is also moving up for other ecosystems as well — the time in which trees, like the cherry blossoms in Japan, bloom; when birds lay their eggs; when the aphid eggs hatch; and when the common toad breeds. Also, the coloration of the ladybird beetle has lightened, and the Edith’s checkerspot butterfly is moving farther north to cooler areas. All of these are almost meaningless events, Root says, unless looked at as a whole. And that picture depicts a world in which global warming is already leaving its imprint.

The work of Root and her colleagues is being heralded by numerous environmentalists as the “smoking gun” of the whole global warming debate, one that finally shows how large an effect even small changes in temperature can have on our biological systems.

“For the first time, it shows people in front of their very eyes what global warming is,” says Jennifer Morgan, director of World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Change Campaign. “What’s very interesting to me is it links everyday life with hard scientific data. We all have the conversations about how the flowers are blooming this year and the birds that are arriving early, and Root’s study provides the answer to the public. Is this global warming? The answer is yes.”

But those on the front lines of observation — birdwatchers — are not so sure. Since the data used to analyze many bird studies are gathered from birdwatchers, and the number of them perched out there has increased exponentially in recent years, critics say this may be one of the reasons why there has been a shift in recorded migration dates.

“I would be hesitant to go too far out on a limb,” says Eirik A.T. Blom, contributing editor to Bird Watcher’s Digest and former editor of Birding Magazine. “Everyone is in a frenzy. It’s easy to get hooked up on global warming and say this is part of it. But biologically it doesn’t necessarily make sense — [although] eventually it will have a big impact and over a long period of time, it’ll change the migratory patterns of birds.” But for something like this to occur, he says, will take many more years.

Peter Dunn, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, says he was initially skeptical, too. When he first read about the study on birds in the U.K. that showed they were laying their eggs earlier in response to temperature, he didn’t believe that this could be found on a wider scale. Dunn was already in the process of analyzing nest records of North American tree swallows, dating back to the 1950s, when he decided to take a peek at the temperature change during those years, too. His study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society two years ago, found that as temperatures have risen, these birds — one of the most common species in the United States — are laying their eggs up to nine days earlier.

“I thought I wouldn’t find as strong of a pattern because I was looking at the entire continent,” says Dunn. “But their food abundance is changing with the temperature. The food that they’re eating are aerial insects, and their abundance is directly correlated with air temperature. When it’s cold out, there are not as much insects; when it’s warm, the insects start to come out during spring and summer.”

While Dunn says he’s certain that it’s happening with birds like the tree swallow, he wonders whether or not birds that have different food sources — such as red-breasted robins, which eat worms — are being as drastically affected by temperature change. So far the swallow’s clutch size (the number of eggs it produces) has not changed, but he says it’s still too early to tell whether there are ramifications to breeding earlier. In fact, there may be some positive aspects. One, he says, is that these chicks may have a better chance of surviving since they will have longer to develop and will have a head start on life.

Critics of the U.N. report, such as University of Virginia environmental sciences professor Patrick Michaels, believe the IPCC report grossly exaggerates the inability of these species, and of humans, to adapt to temperature change.

“It’s science fiction,” says Michaels, who is also a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “The reason for it is quite simple: The dire scenarios are based on assumptions that have extremely low probability. Of all the assumptions that are made, the lowest probability one is that people will sit idly by over the course of 100 years and not adapt to slowly evolving changes in their weather and climate.”

As for the butterflies like the Edith’s checkerspot, which is continuing to move north where it is cooler, Root says we will reach a point in which there is either nowhere farther north a species can move to, or they will run into different habitats, like cities, where they will be unable to settle. This specific species will run into San Diego, a certain roadblock to adaptation, she says.

Root says the solution is to start creating reserves that run north-south, so animals and other species can have room to adapt. And it’s better to start working on it now, she says, before conditions worsen. To those who doubt global warming’s effects, Root offers this analogy: “It’s like a court case: You may not have eyewitnesses, but you have circumstantial evidence, and it keeps on mounting, and all of it points to what we have been doing — and that’s humans ejecting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

While there’s been little doubt that the climate is indeed warming — glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, precipitation is changing — there have been some high-profile skeptics, Bush included. They question the science linking this general warming trend to things that humans do, such as burning fossil fuel, which releases carbon dioxide. The increase of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, is believed to enhance the “greenhouse effect” that traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere that otherwise would be released.

“I don’t think we know the solution to global warming yet and I don’t think we’ve got all the facts,” said Bush during his second presidential debate. (The president’s office did not return phone calls from Salon seeking comment on his current position.)

The new report states emphatically that “most” of the warming, especially over the last 50 years, is attributable to human activity, and not to natural occurrences such as normal climate variations from one decade to another, changes in sunlight or volcanic activity, which can cool the atmosphere.

“I would hope that the Bush administration will read our report very carefully and look at the implications [of our findings],” says Robert Watson, chairman of the IPCC panel.

Previously, the IPCC’s 1995 report estimated that temperatures would increase only up to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Watson says that if the IPCC’s new estimate is correct, people living in low-lying areas will be displaced by the rising seas. We will also see more rainfall and hotter days, leading to heat stress and deaths.

“Remember Chicago?” Watson asks, referring to the 1995 heatwave that killed over 500 people in that city. “I’m not saying that we expect 500 people to die, but it’s that type of phenomenon.” In addition, he says it could change agriculture production in the tropics and subtropics, and lead to a greater incidence of infection-born diseases like malaria.

In 1997, more than 100 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The United States, which emits one-fourth of the world’s total, was one of the signatories. The protocol laid out the requirements — industrialized countries must reduce their emissions rate by an average of 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2010 — but not the details on how to achieve those goals. Last November, a meeting at The Hague designed to come up with methods to execute the treaty collapsed. The dispute largely centered around how much credit the U.S. should be able to get for emissions trading or using “sinks” like forests to soak up carbon dioxide.

After the talks failed, participating countries discussed getting together again in May to continue where The Hague left off. On Thursday, the Bush administration asked that the meeting be held in July.

“There are strong expectations for the U.S. to have a position,” says Nancy Kete, director of the World Resources Institute’s climate, energy and pollution program. “We are urging the Bush administration to not put it off. The science is getting clearer and consensus is stronger that climate change is happening and it’s happening right now.”

But skepticism persists in Washington. Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., is one of those who is not convinced that climate changes and human activity are definitively linked. His office points to fundamental problems with the models the IPCC report used. “Senator Hagel does not reject the idea that the Earth is warming and that human activity may play a factor to it, but we don’t know that for certain yet,” says his spokeswoman Deb Fiddelke. “He strongly supports continued studying.”

Watson says that disbelievers have a choice: Either believe the majority of scientists or the lone critics. He says that the science, although not perfect, is the best evidence available, and reason enough to start taking actions to curb emissions.

Ironically, some environmentalists believe the best hope for an international treaty lies in the new Bush administration. They say a slow changing of the guard gives them hope that this administration will be able to do what the previous one could not. While environmentalists strongly oppose the nomination of Christie Whitman as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, they were pleased that Gale Norton, the nominee for interior secretary, acknowledged the science of global warming during her confirmation hearings.

“I don’t think that [Bush] having an oil industry background precludes him from doing it,” says Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “I think there’s a very good chance that he will come up with a policy.” Claussen points to companies like British Petroleum and Shell, which now have specific emissions targets, as proof that more and more people are believing in the science. Also, industry, she says, is starting to make commitments to everything from solar energy and biomass to fuel cell technology.

“If I could dream, it would be like Nixon going to China,” says Patrick Mazza, researcher for Climate Solutions, an environmental advocacy group. “The U.S. needs to go back to the table with proposals to meet more of its Kyoto obligations domestically. And maybe the Bush administration could pull the Republicans.”

Indeed, Fiddelke says that Senate Republicans will be more likely to work with Bush on the issue since “there is no longer a concern that the administration is going to push the U.S. into a radical position that would damage our economy.”

But in order for there to be any international treaty reducing emissions and combating global warming, there will have to be bipartisan support for it in the Senate, where it must be ratified. It seems unlikely that that could happen without a president who believes that human activity is the cause.

The second issue was the establishment of a system to trade cash credits for emissions. This would effectively allow polluting countries to purchase their way into compliance with treaty requirements through deals with nations whose emissions fell well below the mandated limits. Again, the U.S. was the key backer of creating this kind of trading system.

American negotiators have always stressed the need for a pragmatic agreement, a treaty that a skeptical Congress might reasonably ratify and that also includes incentives for industry — in other words, a treaty with an eye on economic and political as well as environmental concerns. But critics blast the U.S., by far the world’s biggest polluter, for trying to buy and bully its way out of having to make a serious effort to reduce emissions.

Salon asked two experts with very different points of view — an environmental lawyer and a power industry executive — to take a look at the recent summit and predict what will happen next.

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David Hunter is executive director of the Center for International Environmental Law, a public interest environmental law firm based in Washington and in Switzerland. CIEL conducts research on issues such as the role of international financial institutions in furthering environmental policies, provides education and training in environmental law and issues position papers and other publications on global environmental concerns. Hunter did not attend the summit in the Hague.

Do you think there would have been much benefit to an agreement given Congress’ likely resistance to it?

I do. First, I think Congress’ resistance is somewhat overstated. The recent elections have improved the moderates’ hand, particularly in the Senate, which is where ratification takes place. As one example of that, Sen. McCain held very serious hearings on climate change after he’d gone around the country campaigning for president.

I think we would see that McCain and others in the Republican Party would take a more moderate position toward Kyoto. There’s still going to be huge opposition from Jesse Helms and (Robert) Byrd. I wouldn’t say that we definitely would have gotten ratification, but I think it would have been a very serious and very closely fought battle if we’d gotten a decent agreement out of The Hague.

Do you think the dangers of the collapse of the talks have also been overstated? Did anything positive come out of this?

The collapse is a bummer. But the reason why it collapsed was because the U.S. and certain European countries couldn’t come to an agreement over what measures would have to be taken.

A lot depends on what happens now. The problem’s still going to get worse. The science is still going to drive us to have to have international cooperation. So we may come back and ultimately have a stronger agreement. Given that we may have a Bush presidency, it’s hard to believe that we will in the near term have a stronger agreement, but the problem’s not going away.

Do you think there might have been a different outcome at this summit if the presidential election had been resolved before the meeting started?

I don’t know how the dynamics work out there [in The Hague]. But given that most people have thought Bush has the inside track, if the election were going to have an impact it would seem to me to be the fear that if they don’t take this agreement now, they’re not going to get anything for the next four years. On the other hand, some people might have said, “Look, we can make this agreement here and it isn’t going to mean anything because the next administration isn’t committed to it.” That may have ultimately been why people said, “Let’s wait and try to renegotiate this soon.”

Regarding the particular areas of contention — the carbon sinks and the emissions credits — would compromising more with the U.S. have had a severe negative impact on the possibility of reducing emissions?

To be fair, the U.S. has said that they had certain working assumptions with respect to the Kyoto Protocol when they signed it, and that they would be able to take unlimited advantage of the trade emissions and the forests. However, some of the U.S. positions were hard to comport with the treaty text. The bottom line for the environment is that the U.S. is going to have to do more.

It may be that the best way to move this agreement forward is to have the U.S. dip its big toe in the water first, which would be kind of what the U.S. was saying — get us tied into the reporting periods and tighten it down later. But nobody believes that what the U.S was offering is going to be enough to avoid climate change over the long run. The compromise that was put forward by the Dutch on Thursday [on forest sinks] was a reasonable compromise. And the U.S. rejected it. When they came back for the second round on Saturday, the Europeans said, “We’ve given enough.”

Do we need to have a treaty where the biggest polluter in the world is going to be able to meet most of its obligations by not doing anything? I give the European countries credit for saying, “Why have a treaty if it’s just going to have loopholes so big that you can drive a carbon-belching truck through them?”

Where is the best science on the issue coming from now?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is set up under the treaty to organize and look at the science. They issue the reports every five years. They have a major report coming out soon, and a summary was leaked about a month ago as well, that said we do have man-made climate change occurring today. And that’s valuable because there are a lot of different studies going on about climate, but what that effort tries to do is consolidate it in one place and summarize it in a way that’s valuable for policy makers.

What do you expect will happen next?

It could go either way. It’s possible that a lot of countries could move forward with the Kyoto Protocol without the U.S. It’s also probable that most countries, including the U.S., will take domestic measures with or without the treaty.

A realistic view would say that some binding obligations are inevitable, if not this year then within five years, and so trying to continue to organize government response and industry response at the domestic level is a prudent way to go for economies. I think you’ll see a lot of national-level efforts, maybe some regional negotiations. But I don’t know what’s going to happen with the global agreements.

Industry is changing. I think they’re seeing the writing on the wall. We may have a lull for a couple of years because the Bush administration’s initial reaction will be anti-Kyoto and anti-international negotiations. But because industry’s perspective will continue to change, and science will continue to change, we’ll be back at the table in a couple of years.

When you say industry is seeing the writing on the wall, do you mean that they’re being pressured to do something, or that they’re looking at it pragmatically?

I think mostly from a pragmatic point of view right now. There is some writing on the wall from a regulatory point of view, but right now the companies that are switching their philosophies are ones that are saying, “Not only are there cost-effective ways to reduce our climate impacts, but there’s also business opportunities available.” Companies who have a 25-year business plan are starting to take into account the fact that the future is going to be much less dependent on fossil fuels.

Dale E. Heydlauff, senior vice president of environmental affairs for American Electric Power, was one of several U.S. industry representatives who pushed for the controversial carbon sinks and the trading of emissions credits with other nations. He also stressed the need for penalties to be applied to all nations — not just the U.S. — who violate pollution limits set by the treaty.

AEP, a multibillion-dollar company that supplies power to almost 9 million domestic and foreign consumers, is a member of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change’s Business Environment Leadership Council, a group of companies who work with non-governmental organizations to find cost-effective solutions to the global warming problem.

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You told the New York Times during the conference that without strong penalties for countries that break pollution rules, the Kyoto Protocol would be “a fraud.” Can you elaborate on that position?

One of the interesting things, and I don’t think it was well understood over there, is that the issue of a strong and effective compliance enforcement regime is an issue on which there is almost complete unanimity among U.S. industry and U.S. environmentalists. For different reasons perhaps, but there was very much alignment in views. Penalties that act as an effective deterrence for noncompliance — that has been the history of U.S. environmental law for a long time now.

One of the things that we are concerned with in American business is that we don’t want to be bound by strict enforcement provisions if the rest of the world, our trade competitors, do not have similar binding consequences for noncompliance. So we’ve been arguing pretty strongly that you need effective compliance mechanisms. Introducing emissions trading makes compliance and the price of compliance very transparent. We have to presume that not all nations are going to play fair and not try to manipulate the system for profit. If caught, they need to be held accountable.

Did that position conflict with the positions of developing countries?

It was a combination of developing countries and European Union countries. There was just a real divergence of views about how to do it. Developing countries have not liked the idea of binding consequences. You also have different philosophical views. Japan, for example, has long argued that binding consequences are not necessary, that countries would take their compliance obligations seriously and would not want to lose face by failing to comply. That doesn’t give us a whole lot of comfort.

Despite the collapse of the negotiations in The Hague, many people say that there is a greater sense of urgency than ever to pursue serious solutions to global warming. Do you see that as being the case?

I don’t know if I share the same sense of urgency. I certainly believe it’s very important for them to get the rules right. I applaud the decision to reject a bad deal rather than accept it for the sake of getting a deal. I think it’s much more important to take the time necessary to educate themselves about how market mechanisms work and then put in place the kind of rules that will help facilitate cost-effective emission reductions in the future.

What are your thoughts on the Department of Energy report that was released right before the conference started and recommended cost-effective ways for U.S. industry to reduce emissions?

Quite honestly, it suggests that virtually every manager and executive in every industrial sector of America are a bunch of idiots that we haven’t recognized hanging fruit and harvested it by now. I don’t buy it. I think we are always in pursuit of efficiencies and if they were as cheap and affordable as the report suggests it is, we would have already used them. It’s not that easy.

No question that efficiency is going to play a major role, both in the energy supply sector as well as the demand sector. We need to exploit it as much as possible, but I really don’t think there’s as much low-hanging fruit as the study would lead you to believe.

What are a couple of examples of things that your company has worked on?

We have been a global leader in forest preservation and forest carbon management. Another area is in the advancement of efficient energy production in transmission technologies. We’ve been an industry pioneer in these areas for 50-plus years and I think we have a lot to contribute to more efficient and less carbon-intensive technologies. We hope to do that, once we know what the rules of the game are going to be.

What do you think the next step will be in terms of industry’s role?

Industry will clearly lead the effort to reduce, avoid and sequester greenhouse gas emissions. They’re the ones that have the capital and intellectual know-how to make any emissions reduction requirement a success. And sometimes we’re frustrated at these conference that not everyone recognizes that fact, and gives our views more attention and credence.

But the fact is, that’s the history of the world. It is industry and technology that will ultimately solve this problem. We need to have clear and workable and reasonable rules to get on with the task of reducing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions. And those have been elusive.

The question of timing is an important one since Brown’s study, the most recent from the United States government related to global warming, states emphatically that the country can be doing a hell of a lot more to reduce industrial emissions of carbon-based gases. According to the report, reduction goals can be accomplished by offering American companies financial incentives to reduce their emission levels, funneling more money to researching new technologies and pursuing other strategies to promote efficient energy consumption.

The report’s findings greatly complicate — even undermine — the official position of American negotiators at the United Nations conference in the Netherlands. They contend that the U.S. can’t do all that much to lower emission levels domestically and needs to rely heavily on such strategies as “buying” reduction credits from other countries to meet the targets defined in the treaty.

Brown, the chief investigator in the two-year study, is a deputy director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which operates under contract with the Energy Department. She is representing the department at the conference but is not one of the U.S. negotiators, and she describes the differences between her stance and that of the official government delegation as “awkward.”

“Some people question my sanity and tell me I’ve gone up off my rocker by advocating these technologies,” she says. “But I’m just convinced there’s a long way we can go at little or any cost to the economy.”

Her belief — and the report itself — flatly contradict the assertions of many oil companies and other business interests that any effort to cut emissions significantly will cause a drastic increase in energy prices. Yet some environmentalists fear that the report may have been released too late to have a major impact on the negotiations. Brown says she and her colleagues intended to issue it earlier but were delayed because of reviewers’ questions. But she is glad that the report at least came out during rather than after the talks.

The issue is so contentious because the United States, with just 4 percent of the world’s population, emits the most carbon dioxide — 23 percent of the global total — and yet is advocating for an extremely flexibile plan to reduce its share. Three years ago, world leaders gathered in Japan and agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, which gives industrialized countries until 2012 to collectively reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 5.2 percent below the 1990 levels.

Under the treaty’s terms, the U.S. is supposed to reduce its own gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels. Yet by last year, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were 13 percent above the 1990 level, complicating the prospects of meeting the treaty’s goals.

This month’s conference is supposed to determine exactly how nations can reach those numbers. Although some developing countries have ratified the treaty, so far no industrialized countries have. Yet the U.S. and other Western nations must approve the treaty in order for it to have any substantial effect.

The Clinton administration negotiated the treaty, with last-minute intervention by Vice President Al Gore at a difficult point in the discussions. Yet it has not been submitted to the Senate, which must approve it. Since fossil fuels play a key role in every sector of modern life — from heating our homes and offices to running our cars — many politicians fear it will significantly drive up the cost of energy and disrupt the booming American economy.

The fate of Kyoto, in fact, could hang on the outcome of the current presidential crisis. Should Gore succeed in winning the White House, he is expected to push for ratification. George W. Bush’s commitment is far less certain, given his publicly expressed doubts about whether human activity is really causing global warming. Many environmentalists hope that, in the end, the issue will become depoliticized and dealt with in a nonpartisan manner no matter who becomes president.

Global warming is already being blamed for the strange weather patterns and other ecological disturbances observed across the globe in recent years, from rising ocean levels to the melting of polar ice caps. In Canada, the food supply for the Inuit population could be threatened. Some island nations are already battling the effects of higher waters lapping their shores. NASA scientists have observed that the Greenland ice sheet melting away, and temperatures in the North Sea have risen 8.4 degrees just over the last six years.

Global warming is believed to occur when the sun’s heat gets trapped in the atmosphere by carbon-based gases, primarily carbon dioxide, which are emitted from burning fossil fuels like oil and coal. A recent report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the world’s temperature could climb by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years — far more than previously predicted.

“If we don’t abate greenhouse emissions, studies have shown there will be a lot of damage especially with serious storms and droughts and extreme weather, not to mention the rising of sea levels, taking perhaps a third of the Florida Everglades away from us,” Brown says. “So if that’s one of your favorite vacation spots, your grandchildren might not be able to take advantage of that.”

The world first addressed climate change collectively in 1992 at a gathering in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where representatives adopted the nonbinding goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissons. The failure of almost all countries to attain the goals specified in the Rio agreement spurred the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol.

One continuing bone of contention is that the treaty includes binding targets for industrialized nations but not for developing countries. The U.S. position is that the targets should be binding on everyone; developing countries counter that the West is largely at fault for the problem in the first place and should take the most responsibility in dealing with it. Binding them to emission reduction goals, they say, will severely limit their development potential.

The conclusions laid out in Brown’s DOE study conclusions clearly bolster the hand of environmentalists demanding that the government take strong action. “The report is an independent view from a government laboratory and it might have a higher level of credibility than other government reports because it’s clearly not intended to be in line with the U.S. negotiating position,” says Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist at Environmental Defense, a nonprofit advocacy group in New York.

Oppenheimer adds that the report is significant because it is based on recent economic figures rather than those from several years ago. “Those limited number of companies that have been using the cost argument as a protection against a need to act just had the argument torn away from them,” he says.

U.S. negotiators in Kyoto are advocating to keep all options open to decrease greenhouse gas levels — including relying heavily on “emissions trading” with other industrialized countries. This strategy would essentially allow the United States to not reduce its own levels but instead to buy pollution “credits” from other industrialized countries that surpass their specified targets. Another controversial strategy is a “clean development mechanism,” or CDM, which involves industrialized nations retrofitting factories and power plants in developing countries and earning credits for the reduction of emissions achieved through those investments.

Another mechanism U.S. officials favor is a process called sequestration, which would allow countries like Japan, Canada and the U.S. to include in their calculations the degree to which their forests lower the levels of greenhouse gases. Masses of vegetation — also called “sinks” in ecological lingo — absorb carbon dioxide. In the U.S., for example, sinks soak up about 300 million metric tons of the chemical, a significant portion of the country’s total reduction target.

U.S. negotiators have not indicated how much credit they want for sink activity. But representatives from the European Union rejected the use of this technique on Thursday, saying in a statement that “it does not solve remaining problems for the future.”

The U.S. effort to maintain maximum flexibility has given it a bad rap internationally on the issue. “By trying so hard to preserve their options, the U.S. has created the impression that that’s all they want to do,” says Nancy Kete, who is attending the Hague conference as director of the World Resources Institute’s Climate, Energy and Pollution Program.

But the sink issue is not dead yet. The past week has involved negotiators deciding what they will or will not accept. But the officials with the real political and legal authority to reject or approve the treaty’s terms for each country are government ministers, who are scheduled to arrive on Sunday. The parties to the Kyoto Protocol and those attending the current conference do not actually vote on the treaty proposals; instead, the process works through a series of never-ending meetings to see if all parties can come to an agreement they feel they can sign.

Emissions trading and CMD are among the most controversial issues. To some, these strategies are the ultimate triumph of the free market. Supporters argue that they provide a financial incentive to developing countries to reduce their emissions and encourage industrialized nations to invest abroad, where it might be cheaper to retrofit a factory to save energy than it would be at home. “Entrepreneurs looking for cheaper reductions abroad should be encouraged,” says Oppenheimer. “Why throw up a road block?”

Opponents of the U.S. position have two fundamental objections. Developing countries and the European Union believe that it is unethical for countries like the U.S. to essentially buy or invest their way out of reducing their own emissions. The second concern, expressed mainly by environmentalists, is that these transactions would be so complicated and filled with potential loopholes that they won’t end up reducing emissions. Many environmentalists believe that these strategies must be combined with more stringent requirements.

“The United States is working right now on how they don’t have to cut pollution at all or do it overseas,” says Philip Radford, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace U.S.A. “This [the new report] is a great example of how we can do it at home and move forward as a leader, rather than following other countries or demanding that they take the lead ahead of us.”

Brown’s team spent two years researching and analyzing the impact of dozens of potential policies and hundreds of technologies on carbon-based emissions and the U.S. economy. The final report, called “Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future,” has pinpointed a number of strategies to cost-effectively reduce air pollution, greenhouse emissions and domestic dependence on oil.

The report recommends everything from using voltage regulators to reduce the power consumption on home electronics to developing alternative energy sources like wind, solar power and ethanol, which is made from processing crops into liquid fuels. Other recommendations include saving energy by lowering energy waste at power plants, since many operate well below maximum efficiency, and changing regulations making it easier to sell excess energy back to utility companies.

How negotiations proceed next week could be key to how countries approach this issue in the near future. Many environmentalists and government officials believe that strict adherence to an international treaty provides the only chance to stop global warming. And they are concerned that the concept still has high-profile skeptics like Bush, who has challenged the science linking the burning of fossil fuels to global climate change.

Brown fears that such skepticism represents a real threat to the Earth’s environmental health. She warns that apathy about the issues can only lead to severe problems down the line. “If we don’t institute these procedures, I think our credibility as leaders will eventually be questioned as the evidence mounts of global climate change,” she says.

The festive setting, complete with beach balls sporting Eucerin’s name in big black letters, belies the grim reason they have all gathered. Like the “duck-and-cover” classroom exercises during the Cuban missile crisis, and Los Angeles’ smog alerts in the 1980s, which cautioned students not to go outside when pollution levels were high, today’s presentation is teaching a generation of kids in the southern tip of Chile how to accept the unacceptable — how to survive under the expanding ozone hole the rest of the world has created.

“It’s very sad,” says Eduardo Mortiric, a 15-year-old with pale skin and cheeks so sun-kissed it looks like he has rouge on. “I can’t go outside and ride my bike, play soccer anymore or go walking. I burn easily.”

Welcome to life in Punta Arenas in the ozone depletion age.

This port city of 120,000 people, at 53 degrees south latitude, has always been known more for its proximity to other places — five hours from Patagonia’s Torres del Paine, an hour from a penguin colony, a boat ride to Antarctica — than as a destination in its own right. But as ground zero of a global ecological catastrophe, Punta Arenas is becoming famous, or infamous, as the city that has squatted directly under the gaping hole in the earth’s ozone layer. What’s happening down here on the edge of nowhere is an uncontrolled science experiment: exposing human beings in their natural habitat to long-term doses of potentially deadly ultraviolet radiation.

It may take years before the results are in, before we know the full toll in vision problems and skin cancers, illness and death. Until now the rest of the world has watched from afar, complacent in the conviction that it has largely addressed the problem. But it might be a good idea to pay closer attention to what happens down here, because scientists fear that — in the future — regions farther from the poles could be hit by a thinning of the ozone layer.

Contradictions abound in this small city. On many days in September and October — the spring months when the ozone layer is at its thinnest — Punta Arenas officials warn residents to stay inside between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. or risk a severe sunburn. Yet most don’t listen. The regional health minister in charge of disseminating this advice to the public appears at official events with a deep tan from a recent skiing trip. People here complain about the ecological disaster the rest of the world has inflicted on them — then they complain that foreign visitors draw too much attention to the problem. Doctors warn patients of the need to wear protective hats sturdy enough to withstand the powerful wind down here — but know that the gear must be attractive enough so fashion-minded Chileans will actually wear them. Officials acknowledge the critical need to address the problem — but claim they won’t be able to afford $180,000 for an ozone- and radiation-measuring instrument after Punta Arenas scientists return the only one they have later this month to the institute in Brazil from which they borrowed it.

And Punta Arenas is where Beiersdorf, a German cosmetics company, markets itself by sponsoring a play for preschoolers featuring an adorable penguin who slathers the firm’s sunblock over himself from head to web.

Though scientists once thought they had a handle on the problem, the ozone hole reached its largest dimensions yet in September, stretching across an area of 11 million square miles — a distance three times the size of the United States. And it has subsequently wandered all the way from its icy seasonal home of Antarctica to this port city. In Punta Arenas, according to local measurements, the residents are exposed to levels of UVB radiation 40 percent greater than normal when the ozone hole is above.

The worsening situation has so alarmed Chilean officials that, for the first time ever, they are demanding help from the international community to help finance research on the effects of ozone depletion on ecosystems and human health. Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations, Juan Gabriel Valdes, is addressing the U.N. General Assembly on the issue this month.

But Chilean officials are concerned because asking for assistance affronts their pride and sense of self-sufficiency. “I am not like the guy in ‘Jerry Maguire,’ saying, ‘Show me the money! Show me the money!’” says Rodrigo Alvarez, a congressman for the Magallanes region, where Punta Arenas is located. “This is a problem that we didn’t create. There is an international responsibility to this southern region — Australia, Argentina, Chile. The [ozone hole] was created by the whole world.”

The ozone layer lies in the stratosphere more than 10 miles above the Earth’s surface. Because it absorbs most of the sun’s sometimes deadly, DNA-destroying ultraviolet B radiation, or UVB, it enabled life as we know it to thrive on earth. “It’s like a bulletproof vest — if you start thinning out the lead, you let more bullets through,” says Ed DeFabo, research professor of dermatology at George Washington University Medical Center and chairman of the International Arctic Science Committee’s panel that examines the impacts of increased UVB radiation.

Scientists discovered the hole in the ozone layer — more accurately, a thinning of the layer — in 1982. They linked it to the widespread use of manmade chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) in such products as aerosol sprays, refrigerants and solvents. Once released, these substances rise to the stratosphere, where the sunlight causes them to break apart into chlorine and other elements. In the Southern Hemisphere, the depletion occurs largely in the spring because rising temperatures and the presence of ice crystals atop the polar stratospheric clouds facilitate complex chemical reactions between ozone molecules and the CFC and HCFC components.

In 1997, more than 140 countries signed the Montreal Protocol, in which they agreed to phase out the use of these chemicals. However, because the CFCs and HCFCs can take years to rise high enough to start causing the damage, scientists believe that it will be decades before the ozone layer can replenish itself and return to normal.

More recently, however, evidence has mounted that global warming, not just the CFCs and HCFCs, can also cause ozone depletion. Virtually all members of the reputable scientific community believe that much of the current trend of global warming can be attributed to human use of non-renewable sources of energy. And they believe that many of the bizarre ecological and climatic phenomena of the past few years — the record high temperatures and the shrinking of the polar ice caps, for example — can be attributed to global warming.

The situation is not likely to improve any time soon. According to a report released recently by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, average global temperatures could rise as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. That also means that ozone depletion could get worse — much worse — before it gets better.

“This could mean a truly torrid world in many areas and frightful extremes of weather,” says Arjun Makhijani, president of the Maryland-based Institute for Energy and Environmental Research.

So far the problem has mostly affected large swaths of the Southern Hemisphere. In some ways the situation might ultimately be worse in places like Australia and New Zealand, where higher temperatures prompt people to spend more time outdoors wearing far fewer clothes. But some researchers ominously predict “ozone hole creep” as the century progresses. Jonathan Shanklin, one of the scientists who discovered the Antarctic hole, announced just last week that a second hole above the Arctic, which has generally been smaller than the one over the southern pole, could grow to the same size by 2020 because of global warming.

Some scientists also fear that there could be increased ozone thinning across the globe, not just at the poles. This could be particularly dangerous for places like Miami and San Diego, since regions closer to the equator already experience relatively high natural levels of UVB radiation even without ozone depletion. But double doses from a thinning ozone layer could push these sun-belt cities well into the danger zone.

Given the stark differences in environmental policy between the two presidential candidates, next week’s election could have a significant impact on the situation. Though President George Bush memorably mocked Al Gore as “Ozone Man” during the 1992 campaign because of Gore’s long-standing interest in the environment, the fate of the ozone layer itself has not been an issue in the current presidential race. But global warming has entered the debate.

Gore has pledged to sign the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, which calls for countries to reduce their use of fossil fuel to stem global warming and is the subject of a gathering of world leaders in The Hague later this month. Texas Gov. George W. Bush opposes the treaty and maintains — against virtually all the available evidence — that the jury is still out on the causes and impact of global warming.

Far from the rhetoric of Washington and the presidential campaign, Nelson Paredes sits behind the registration desk at Punta Arenas’ public hospital on this frigid Sunday afternoon. Paredes, the hospital supplies manager, needs no words to describe how harsh the sun’s springtime dose has become. His face reads like a textbook on the current state of the environment in Punta Arenas.

Paredes looks older than his 48 years. His face is blotchy, like a ragged quilt with interlocking patches of natural coffee-colored skin and big, white scars. He explains that one sunny day last October, he attended a sports event and stood outside for four hours. That night he could feel “despidir” — fire — on his face. “I was surprised because that night I couldn’t open my eyes, they were so inflamed,” he says. “Nothing like this ever happened before.”

Though the pain lasted for three months and the effects of the burn remain highly visible today, Paredes, like many residents here, does not always remember to put on his protective lotion. Nor does he keep up with the official day-to-day media alerts about levels of radiation. On this particular afternoon, he explained as music blared in the background, he had forgotten to look at the newspaper that morning and, once at work, was caught up listening to the radio.

When he got sunburned last year, Paredes sought out Dr. Jaime Abarca, a dermatologist at the public hospital in Punta Arenas. Paredes was one of 31 patients who came to him with sunburns last year. In the previous 13 years, says Dr. Abarca, only one person would generally arrive each season with a sunburn. “It’s a fact that not only here in Punta Arenas but in the rest of the world, we are going to have more skin cancer due to the ozone depletion,” Dr. Abarca says. “That’s what happens after about 50 years of intermittent severe exposures to the sun.”

The sun’s touch in Punta Arenas feels gracious, not harsh, but its aftereffects are punishing. Though I have slathered myself with SPF 45 constantly since I arrived here, after two days my cheeks are slightly sunburned. I don’t need to worry about the rest of my body, since I am covered from head to toe in winter wear. The cold was once considered a curse down here, but now people are grateful for it, since it forces them to cover up just to survive the temperatures. Now their clothes also help to protect them against the harmful effects of ozone depletion.

UVB is known to affect the skin, eyes and immune system, but there is no immunologist in town. And the local health minister, Lidia Amarales, has been granted scarce resources — just $30,000 a year from the regional government — to educate people about the problem. “It is impossible to give the sun cream to everyone in Punta Arenas because it’s expensive,” says Amarales. “We have other priorities, like cancer, diabetes, hypertension, adolescent and mental health, and respiratory diseases.”

Amarales has focused her efforts on what she calls “education and prevention,” but her policy boils down to little more than warning the residents to protect themselves by wearing sunblock that many can’t afford, wide-brimmed hats, long-sleeved shirts and sunglasses offering protection from UVB rays. She has also proposed a plan to require all students to take a class on the ozone layer, and has pushed for the local newspaper, La Prensa Austral, to receive daily radiation projections.

Since earlier this year, the projections have become, like the horoscope, a daily feature of the newspaper. On the last page, a picture of a traffic signal, with colors corresponding to the level of radiation for that day, from red (the worst) down to orange, then yellow, then green. There have been 13 red alerts so far this year. The radiation levels are collected by Claudio Casiccia, the harried geophysicist who single-handedly monitors the depletion levels from the rooftop of Punta Arenas’ University of Magallanes. A red alert means that the radiation level is so high that it can cause some people’s skin to burn within five minutes.

And yet when you ask many people on the street about that day’s color alert — including the hotel receptionist, as I did morning after morning — they simply don’t know. Sometimes they guess, raising their inflection on the last syllable to transform their statement into a question — “na-ran-JA?” (orange), for example, or “roJO?” (red). Or else they may confide knowingly, like an impoverished woman who works in a fish cannery and lives near the town port, that a red alert indicates that a big storm is about to blow in.

“I think a lot of people are going to die in the future,” says Alvarez, the congressman from the region. “People at the refinery, the fisherman, I think a lot of people are not going to change their way of life and many will suffer and risk dying.” Alvarez is backing a bill that proposes to use public funds to subsidize the cost of protective gear for those who can’t afford it. The cheapest glasses with UV-B protection at the local optometrist shop cost around $33; sunscreen with SPF 15 is about $12.

While the much-applauded Montreal Protocol addressed the problem of the ozone-destroying chemicals, it did not establish any type of fund for researching the long-term biological effects or for helping those countries on the front lines. There has also been no other international initiative to deal with the problem; as a result, the people in the world’s southern regions — like Chile, Argentina and Australia, where ozone depletion is the most severe — have little information as to what will really happen to them after many years. “The industrialized countries have been mainly responsible for emitting ozone-depleting compounds, but they haven’t taken responsibility for the health and ecological damage that their emissions may cause to third parties, like Chile,” says environmental researcher Arjun Makhijani. “As we see health effects emerge, there’s no way to hold people accountable for the damages and no one has stepped up to the plate and said, ‘We will help you if there are damages.’”

The effects of the UV radiation on the ecosystems and animals in the area are also not known. Sheep, which dot the pastures like cotton candy, are so prevalent that Magallanes is called the “region granadera,” or cattle region. “We don’t know how the animals feel — maybe they feel something,” says Carlos Rowland, a veterinarian and director of the regional branch of the national Agricultural and Cattle Services. “But the sheep live for four to five years and then the farmers send them to be killed. The sheep don’t live long enough to see if they are developing problems with their eyes and skin.”

Every morning at 7, Maria Teresa Argüelles, an unassuming kindergarten teacher, arises and applies sunburn cream and then reminds her 11-year-old son Daniel to put on his hat and lotion. She has bought Daniel sunglasses but is afraid to let him take them to school because they are expensive and she fears he will break them. And like many kids, he often just shoves his hat in his bookbag. “I think the problem is that people in general aren’t conscious of the sun’s effects,” she says.

Argüelles points upward with her index finger and explains that the sky looks no different than when she was a child. But it certainly feels different. “It now stings my skin,” she says as she touches her cheeks with both hands and scrunches up her face.

She worries, too, about her students. They come in with rosy cheeks after outdoor playtime — one child recently burned himself severely and had to stay out of school for several days. And her husband Jorge Asencio, a security guard for a 7-Up factory who works outside for much of the day, comes home complaining of headaches when the sun’s been particularly bright.

Two weeks ago, he came home complaining about vision problems. “I think it’s because of the sun,” she says about his right eye, which is completely bloodshot. Asencio says he has problems seeing up close, but he can’t afford to go to the doctor until the end of the month, when he gets paid.

“These people are not accustomed to much radiation and suddenly, they are getting more,” says Dr. Juan Honeyman, head of the department of dermatology at Santiago’s University of Chile Medical School. “The problem is, with the switch, people can get burned — the acute effect of UVB radiation.”

While there have been noticeable health changes in the people of Punta Arenas, as Honeyman has documented in new research, the effects haven’t been as severe as might have been expected. He compared two studies, one from 1992 and one last year, that examined the health of similar groups of people — middle-aged hospital employees and outdoor workers like farmers and fishermen. Honeyman found a 28 percent increase in cheilitis (fissures and cracks around the mouth); a 16.4 increase in conditions like solar spots (small patches of sunburn); and a 3.6 percent increase in benign skin conditions like facial hyperpigmentation (a darkening of the skin), herpes simplex type 1 and photoaging (a premature aging and wrinkling of the skin).

Only a few days after I left Punta Arenas, I felt the first tingle of a cold sore forming in the right-hand corner on my upper lip. Was this because I forgot to put on my SPF lip balm after the first day? Despite my hyperawareness of the issue — the whole reason I came was to learn about the ozone hole’s effects — I behaved no differently than most of the people who live here.

On the first day, I bundled up completely and looked as if I’d been dressed by an overprotective mom, with a baseball cap pulled down to shade my face, sunglasses, lip balm and sun cream. But gradually I shed my concern and went about my business as if nothing was amiss — even though I knew everything was. I stopped using my hat because the face-slapping wind kept blowing it off, and I tired of constantly transferring my sunglasses between my eyes and my purse.

While I saw some people completely bedecked in protective clothing, Honeyman confirms the sense I got walking around the streets that few bother. According to his most recent study, 64 percent of people have never used sunburn lotion to protect themselves despite official warnings, and 41 percent have never worn sunglasses in their entire lives. But he stresses that he found no significant change in rates of skin cancer or pre-malignant cancer. According to the local health minister Amarales, the incidence rate of skin cancer is 6.3 per 100,000 people, although she has no figures for the rate 10 years ago. Only recently were doctors required to start reporting cases of skin cancer the way they report cases of infectious disease.

Many of the officials here make it sound like it will be a simple task to convince people to suddenly change their daily habits. Amarales seems naive, and a little flippant, as he talks about how easy it is to remain in the shadows of trees or tall buildings on high radiation days, even though it’s freezing here and even colder in the shade. After a few days in Punta Arenas, I found myself crossing the street to walk in the sun’s path and bask a little in the warmth — and I was highly motivated not to, and knew I was leaving soon.

The fact is that not everyone has the luxury of choosing whether or not to be in the sun. How can farmers stay out of the sun, when their animals are scattered across thousands of acres and their days start at 7 a.m. and continue until dusk? And how about the construction workers I passed on a Saturday morning, burly men shoveling gravel in the middle of the street in direct sunlight? Their foreman, Juan Aguilante, directed them from the shade while wearing his protective clothes. “No, none of them are wearing sunblock,” he says. “They can’t afford it.”

But Amarales remains confident she can get her message across. “Changing people’s habits is the most difficult thing in the world, but I think I am optimistic because the people in our region are easy to educate,” she says.

Of course, there are a few signs that the message is reaching the populace. Some people on the street stroll past wearing sunglasses and baseball caps; locals say no one did in the past. A taxi driver who is standing outside his cab waiting for customers says he became concerned just this year. Every day now, he says, he listens to the reports on the radio and scans the alerts in the newspaper so he can dress appropriately.

Yet people here can be prickly and defensive when the subject arises. Even Dr. Honeyman, whom everyone appears to regard as an expert on the subject, says that more UVB radiation falls on sunny Santiago, the country’s capital and most populated city. And on many days this is true. The ozone layer is naturally thinner closer to the equator; over the poles it is usually thick until the seasonal depletion occurs. (The problem, of course, is that people living closer to the equator are more used to dealing with the effects of the sun — and as the ozone layer thins, the problems in those hotter cities will worsen.)

They also express irritation at the foreign reporters who are so interested in their fate. More than once, people told me to consider the situation in my own country, in places like Florida and Southern California, where people strut around in bikinis and trunks for months at a time with the sun glaring down on them.

And many people still don’t believe there’s a problem. Long before Dolly, the infamous Scottish lamb that claimed her 15 minutes of fame by being the first animal to be cloned, there was another picture of what happens when you mess with Mother Nature — the Sheep of Punta Arenas. Apocalyptic reports from local farmers of sheep that had gone blind from the sun with cataracts circulated across the globe. But the reports were found to be untrue.

That was several years ago, but the false report has long lingered in some residents’ minds, bolstering their sense that all this talk of ozone doomsday is just an exaggeration, as overhyped a threat as the Y2K bug. Jurgen Schulmeister, a 45-year-old German expat, is one of the skeptics. Atop a hill just outside town, he lives with his Chilean wife and two children in a house with its own indoor swimming pool. “Ten years ago, some tourists gave me an article from German scientists saying that yes, there is a big problem and that plants and animals will die. And now I live here, and there’s no problem with plants, animals, cancer. Ten years later people work normally, they live, with no problem.”

Of course, scientists like Honeyman say that it’s the cumulative effects of the sun that will cause the real damage, and that it may take years before the consequences become apparent. Until then, the people here continue with their lives, taking each day as it comes, adapting their behavior accordingly — or not — and wondering what the bright yellow disc in the sky will do to them and their children.

Maria Arguelles is one of those who worries. As she sits by her living room window and watches the fierce wind rip clothes off the laundry line, she says sadly that she feels helpless against the elements. If the situation does get worse in the next few years, she says, she and her family will probably leave town.

“But at that point, wherever you go, you take your health problems with you,” she says. “Now all I can do is wait.”