Irwin Goodwin, WashingtonOn his first visit to Europe as president,George W. Bush will tell European leadersthis week that he will not accept mandatorylimits on carbon emissions. He remainsunmoved on the issue despite fresh confir-mation from the US National Academy ofSciences that such emissions are probablyresponsible for global warming.

On 11 June Bush announced that hewould support a new research initiative “tostudy areas of uncertainty and identify prior-ity areas where investment can make a differ-ence”. He also proposed “a joint venture withthe European Union, Japan and others todevelop state-of-the-art climate modelling”.

But Bush sought to shift the blame fromthe United States, which has 5% of theworld’s population but produces about 25%of all carbon emissions. “Our approach mustbe based on global participation, includingthat of developing countries whose netgreenhouse-gas emissions now exceed thosein developed countries,” he said.

The academy study was requested by theWhite House last month (see Nature 411, 255;2001), and was chaired by Ralph Cicerone,chancellor of the University of California,Irvine. It found that the conclusion of theIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) — that the global warming over thepast 50 years is probably the result of increasesin greenhouse gases — “accurately reflects thecurrent thinking of the scientific community”.

But the academy said that the summariesof IPCC reports placed less emphasis onuncertainty than the reports themselves, andsuggested changes to the IPCC process.

The White House has been trying to easeworries about the official US stand on globalwarming. After rejecting the Kyoto Protocolon climate change in March, Bush set up acabinet task force on the issue, headed byVice-President Richard Cheney and Bush’snational security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.

Just before the academy released its reporton 6 June, Cicerone and panel member Sher-wood Rowland briefed White House and stateofficials on its contents. Cheney and Rice thenmet with environmentalists to sketch out theirplans for addressing climate change.

“They are weighing very heavily what todo at home before deciding what to doabroad,” says Eileen Claussen, president ofthe Pew Center on Global Climate Change,who attended one of these meetings.

A Bush spokesman says the academyreport provided “a basis of sound science onwhich decisions can be made”, adding that“the president agrees action has to be taken”.

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But Don Ritter, a former Republican con-gressman who now heads the National Envi-ronmental Policy Institute in Washington,says that the academy report may proveembarrassing for Bush. He says: “The presi-dent probably never heard of Seneca, theRoman philosopher, who said: ‘Do not askfor what you will wish you had not got’.” ■

➧ http://www.nas.edu

Bush set to clash with Europeanleaders over carbon emissions

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Meredith Wadman, WashingtonSenior advisers to the National Institutes ofHealth (NIH) have called for a billiondollars a year to be spent on constructionand renovation of biomedical research labs.

The proposed investment would dwarfthe $75 million that Congress earmarked forconstruction from the biomedical agency’s2001 budget of $20 billion. But advocates ofthe change say that a boost in such spendingis needed if research infrastructure is tokeep pace with the doubling of the overallNIH budget between 1999 and 2003.

The recommendation was delivered in areport to acting NIH director RuthKirschstein on 7 June by a groupcommissioned in 1999 by outgoing NIHdirector Harold Varmus.

The group says that existing construction

funding cannot keep pace with recent largeincreases in NIH funding for researchers.“We wanted …s people [to] understand youcan’t do research in a garage,” says WilliamBrody, president of Johns HopkinsUniversity, who chaired the group.

But NIH officials fear that Congress mayrespond to the request with money that theNIH could otherwise spend on grants toresearchers. “If there was to be interest inputting more money in construction … thenthey might try to find it somewhere else [inthe NIH],” notes Kirschstein. She deferred adecision on the group’s findings until thecommittee meets again in December.

Academic medical centres in the UnitedStates customarily pay for new laboratoriesthemselves, hoping to recoup some of theircosts from government grants. ■

Labs seek share of NIH spending

Warming up: cabinet members look on as Bush confronts climate change ahead of his visit to Europe.

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