Climate report may have cut Katrina impact-analyst

WASHINGTON, Aug 29 (Reuters) Hurricane Katrina might have caused less damage if the Bush administration had completed a required report of US vulnerability to global warming before the storm hit, an environmental policy analyst said today.

The report, supposed to be finished in November 2004 and still undone, was meant to be a national assessment that should have turned up the various problems that added up to catastrophe, said John Coequyt, an analyst with the environmental group Greenpeace.

''Part of what happened in Katrina is we didn't know how important it was to get some of these levees right,'' Coequyt said, referring to the barriers that broke and flooded parts of New Orleans after the hurricane hit two years ago on Wednesday.

''If we had these national assessments pointing to these vulnerabilities, the chances that they get fixed are going to be higher,'' Coequyt said by telephone. ''And if we know that hurricanes are going to get stronger and if we know that sea level rise is accelerating, then we can plan for these things.

''If we choose to not actually complete these assessments, then the chances that we'll get that right are a lot less.'' Last week, environmental activists hailed a federal judge's ruling that orders the Bush administration to complete a global warming research plan and a national assessment as required by the Global Change Research Act of 1990.

This act requires extensive reports on global warming's impact every four years. The last one was completed at the end of 2000 before President George W. Bush took office.

COURT ORDERS NEW DEADLINES US District Judge Saundra Armstrong ruled on August 21 that a proposed research plan is due March 1, 2008, with a national assessment of the environmental, economic, health and safety impacts of global warming due May 31, 2008.

The ruling was a victory for environmental groups that sued the federal government, including Greenpeace, the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth.

''This administration has denied and suppressed the science of global warming at every turn,'' Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement after the ruling, which he called ''a stern rebuke of the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to global warming.'' A spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy noted the ruling and said its deadlines were in line with what the US administration already has planned.

The spokeswoman, Kristin Scuderi, said in a statement that the Bush administration plans to complete peer-reviewed reports that comprise the scientific assessment by the end of this year, five months before the court's deadline.

However, these individual peer-reviewed reports are not equal to the overview of the science and policy envisioned by the act, according to Greenpeace's Coequyt.

Rather than a deliberative process that involves the US public, scientists and government, Coequyt said the administration might try to do ''cutting and pasting'' from the findings of the UN Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change to meet the court-ordered deadline.

''Whatever this administration does, I think it's now very likely that the next administration will begin a robust national assessment and that can be used ultimately to help guide federal and state policy,'' he said.

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