(This is Part 1 of a column on Global Warming, which discusses the approach to take in thinking about the problem. Part 2, which discusses possible solutions, will appear Tuesday.)

The National Academy of Sciences Thursday released its study of global warming, designed to advise U.S. policymakers on the reality of the global warming threat, over the next 100 years. The bottom line?

Time to buy beach frontage on Hudson’s Bay.

The report basically validates the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change studies on global warming and suggests that the mean global temperature will be higher by 2100, by between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius, with a mean estimate of 3 degrees Celsius. In the last century, global temperature has risen by between 0.4 and 0.8 degrees Celsius, but interestingly, half of the effect of greenhouse gases was counteracted by sulfates, from coal burning, which when suspended in the atmosphere have a cooling effect, akin to that of the dust from a volcano.

Well, there’s certainly one conclusion that can be drawn from these statistics. If sulfates from coal, removed by modern technology, are thought to have offset in the last century half the effect of greenhouse warming, then the whole environmental movement since the Clean Air Act of 1970 has been, in terms of global warming, a ghastly mistake. We should be burning more, not less coal, should replace gas and oil fired power stations with coal fired, should instigate a massive government marketing campaign for coal fired central heating, and should immediately commence retrofitting to steam on the nation’s railroads.

More seriously, the science of global warming is very uncertain indeed, though it is becoming increasingly clear that the effect is real, and that it will greatly worsen by 2100 (and carry on worsening thereafter) if we simply continue to pursue present policies. Unfortunately, in most scientific bodies, including, it appears, the NAS, the shortterm political impulse is stronger than the longterm scientific one. In this case, the impulse appears to be to weaken the Bush administration’s negotiating position and thereby increase environmental controls (and thereby, the influence and budget of environmental scientists) through some mechanism such as the Kyoto agreement.

Thus, while the multiplicity of evidence suggests that global warming is real, the alignment of the NAS with the IPCC should be regarded with suspicion. Nevertheless, let us for the sake of argument, take it as a given that, on present policies, the climate is likely to warm by 3 degrees Celsius by 2100, with considerable uncertainty either way around that estimate. Let us also take it as given (which is more uncertain) that the principal cause of this climate change is carbon dioxide emissions, which have increased by about 17 percent since records began in 1958 to a level of 370 parts per million by volume, though methane, emitted both by humans and, notoriously, by livestock, is also a factor. Other factors, such as sulfates, also cause smaller changes, which either accelerate or retard the warming effect. The lags in the system are very great, so that a discovered undesirable climate change can take many decades to reverse.

The question next arises: what should be done about this?

In examining possible solutions, it is of course necessary to assess the size of the problem we are attempting to solve, not in terms of temperature itself, but in terms of economic cost. Suppose the world does warm by 3 degrees by 2100, so what? The polar icecaps will doubtless melt, raising the sea level, but only by a few feet. There will be climate changes in many regions, but at least some such changes, such as the warming of Siberia and Canada, would appear almost wholly beneficial — after all, 3 degrees Celsius is considerably less than the variation between different summers. Cost-benefit analysis, when the cost being avoided is amorphous as a rise in temperature a hundred years from now, whose scale is in any case uncertain, is not possible to carry out with any degree of accuracy.

Nevertheless, it seems likely that some action must be taken, though we don’t yet know how much is appropriate, if only because 2100 is not the end of the story, and, while a temperature rise of 3 degrees Celsius may be acceptable, a temperature rise of 10 degrees Celsius, possible at present emission levels by say 2250, would be very unpleasant indeed, and a rise of 25 degrees Celsius would presumably be fatal to human and most animal life.

Further, current levels of carbon emissions have been produced by Western living standards that are enjoyed by less than 20 percent of the world’s population. Total U.S. emissions, for example, are still considerably larger than those of India or China, in spite of their combined population being 10 times that of the United States. If we are to accept the restrictions of the NAS, let us also accept the bright humanitarian goal that, by 2100, the great majority of the world’s population will have been brought up to something approaching today’s Western living standards. If this is to happen, then if present technology is used current emission levels and their warming effect will be multiplied many-fold.

Having said that, it is clear that our approach should minimize rather than maximize the actions taken, rather spending money on observation and research. This is not a known near-term possible catastrophe which must be avoided, as was the ozone layer problem that was solved by the ban on chlorofluorocarbons. Instead, it is a very longterm problem, moderate in the lifetime of anyone now living, which we have many decades to address. It is therefore desirable, not to take extreme and economically damaging actions at once, but to take modest steps, albeit ones that we know to be in the right direction, while continuing to study the problem and to observe the costs and benefits of the steps we take.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)

This article originally appeared on United Press International.