Sir

As one who believes that restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions will eventually be essential, I am alarmed by the dangers of hyperbole with which Tim O'Riordan lards his review of Ross Gelbspan's book (Nature 389, 685; 1997). He urges all to read the book to understand how Washington lobbyists have determined the US position at the Kyoto conference next month; his review will be taken by many as the proof for which they have been waiting of the calumny that the research community is both arrogant and politically naïve.

Lobbyists in the United States lobby for all possible causes, and have names such as the Federation of American Scientists, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace. They abound because no US legislation is enacted without wide consultation by the Congress, invariably in public.

I share the opinion that this arrangement is preferable to the mostly private consultation that precedes legislation in European democracies other than in Scandinavia. Lobbying has not prevented the US Congress from enacting some of the world's toughest legislation on air and water quality and prescription drugs — invariably in the teeth of opposition from lobbyists.

O'Riordan goes on to say that “scientists are trained not to transgress into the world of judgement and political bickering” — but then does just that himself with phrases such as “the United States seems politically and ideologically incapable of coming to terms with the moral and inequitable aspects of global climate change”. He predicts that Kyoto will disappoint “the wishes of the scientific community”, but promises (threatens?) a “more aggressive and politicized science” afterwards.

This view of science does scant justice to admirable groups (lobbyists?) such as Pugwash, while the implication that Kyoto would be a done deal were it not for the obscurantism of the United States is an over-simplification, to put it mildly.

There are three reasons for regarding the Kyoto process with suspicion: (1) the predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are persuasive as to the direction of temperature change but may well exaggerate the rate of change by a factor of two; (2) nothing in the IPCC volume on “impacts” suggests that there has yet been a serious study of the effect of the wished-for restrictions on the global economy or of how best holistically to manage a transition to a stable greenhouse; and (3) the problem of inequity (between rich and poor countries) is dealt with only crudely in the draft convention — at the very least, it should include agreed criteria for telling when developing countries become developed.