WASHINGTON, DC - Another two inches of snow fell in Washington Sunday night, and today's high temperature might reach 20 degrees. As the East Coast enters into its eighth week of temperatures more than 15 degrees below normal, skeptics of global warming are starting to change their mind and say that, whatever their doubts, they now hope global warming is indeed true. Another anomaly of recent days is the news that U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases (particularly CO2) declined by 1.2 percent in 2002, the largest decline in more than a decade.

Yet environmentalists did not especially cheer this unexpected news. Nor did they argue that it means the U.S. could make serious progress toward the Kyoto protocol target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent below 1990 levels by the year 2010. This silence was for an obvious reason. The decline was attributed mostly to the economic slump, which was relatively mild by historical standards, and gives credence to the many estimates that achieving the Kyoto target would impose enormous costs on the U.S. economy over the next decade.

The second explanation raises even more counter-intuitive problems: a warm winter in 2002 is said to have depressed fossil fuel use. But if the planet is warming because of fossil fuel use, and fossil fuel use goes down with warmer weather, then. . .

An even stranger development on this topic was a surprisingly level-headed analysis of the American perspective on climate change coming out of France last year from Le Centre Francais Sur Les Etats-Unis (French Center on the United States). In The United States and Climate Change, authors Pierre Lepetit and Laurent Vignuier note that the U.S. emissions target was far more ambitious than the targets for any European nation, and therefore neither economically nor politically realistic.

But Lepetit and Vignuier go on to point out that the outcome of U.S. climate policy would not have been much different even if Bush had tried to keep on the same course as the Clinton administration, a point PRI has made repeatedly in its annual Index of Leading Environmental Indicators. The authors add that "A dramatic short term reduction [of CO2] might entail damaging economic consequences and, in turn, jeopardize the ability to invest in the long-run scientific and technological solutions." "The objections are serious," the authors conclude, "and Europeans cannot bury their heads in the sand and say that all these arguments are irrelevant." Not bad coming from the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys," as the political philosopher Homer Simpson calls the French. Clearly those old Jerry Lewis movies are starting to have some effect.