A faiure to equip.

Byline: The Register-Guard

In recent years the Bush administration has been forced, ever so grudgingly, to acknowledge the reality of global warming. But it has failed to provide federal officials overseeing the nation's forests, parks, marine sanctuaries and monuments with guidance on how to respond to the profound changes resulting from climate change.

A new report by the Government Accountability Office says federal agencies ranging from the U.S. Forest Service to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have received scant direction on how to respond to the effects of climate change.

Make no mistake - it's climate change, not "land management techniques" or other factors, that appears to be the primary cause of earlier snow melts, extended droughts, intensifying wildfires, disappearing coral reefs and a host of other changes, investigators conclude.

The report says Interior Department officials, in particular, have failed to make climate change a high priority, despite a 2001 order from outgoing Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit to include climate change in land management planning. "Without such guidance, their ability to address climate change and effectively manage resources is constrained," the report said.

That's hardly surprising. Babbit's successor, Gale Norton, dedicated her tenure to opening public lands to commercial exploitation and rolling back environmental protections. Norton's agenda left no room for dealing with the effects of climate change on the 30 percent of the nation's lands that lie under federal control.

By contrast, Norton's replacement, Dirk Kempthorne, established a department-wide task force on climate change that is expected to produce its findings next month. But there's little reason to hope the Bush administration will do anything other than hand off the problem of dealing with the consequences of climate change on public lands to the next administration.

Those consequences are already considerable. GAO investigators spent three years studying four representative areas: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, Alaska's Chugach National Forest, Montana's Glacier National Park, and grasslands and shrubs managed by the BLM in northwestern Arizona. A sampling of their findings:

Since 1850, the glaciers in Glacier National Park have declined from 150 to 26 as both summer and winter temperatures continue to rise in the park. Some scientists predict the park's glaciers will disappear entirely within three decades.

Climate-triggered bleaching in the Florida Keys is damaging the region's vital fishing and tourism industries. Meanwhile, low-lying areas in the Keys have been hit by rising sea levels that have brought more saltwater on the land, damaging sensitive freshwater plant and wildlife habitat.

Invasive grasses and drought in the Mojave desert have significantly increased the severity and frequency of wildfires.

An infestation of spruce bark beetles attributed to climate-related insect outbreaks is killing up to 1.4 million acres of forests in Alaska's Chugach and Kenai Peninsula.

The GAO report was requested by Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and John Kerry, D-Mass. It's increasingly clear that any effort to address global warming at the federal level must originate with Congress and not the Bush administration.

As federal lawmakers consider broad steps ranging from mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions to a carbon tax, they must also do whatever is necessary to force the administration into doing more to deal with the far-reaching effects of climate change on federal lands.

The Bush administration may be unwilling to lead the fight against global warming. But it should, at the very least, equip federal agencies to deal with its consequences on public lands.