President Bush has found himself forced to respond seriously to the issue of global warming. A National Academy of Sciences report, which the president requested, confirms that warming is real and getting worse. The conclusive findings, coming on the eve of the president's trip to Europe, add to the growing pressure at home and abroad for the United States to curtail its emissions of heat-trapping gases and to take international leadership on the issue.

The academy's report said nothing new in a scientific sense; warming is long established as a real phenomenon, and the risks climate change poses to the environment, agriculture and public health have been documented for years. President Bush is using the new report as a means to recover some credibility on the issue. His flip-flop on a campaign pledge to seek limits on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases hurt him at home and overseas. The academy's report gives the White House a face-saving way to rethink its greenhouse policy. A new approach could be announced this week.

But environmentalists and the Europeans want more than for Bush to acknowledge the obvious. While in Europe, the allies will press for specific steps the administration plans to take to curb the consumption of fossil fuels. Satisfying them will require Bush to retreat from his just-announced energy policy, which focuses on consumption, not conservation. If the Kyoto Protocol, which sets tight limits on emissions, is truly dead, it's up to Bush, as president of the world's biggest polluter, to forge a treaty the international community can live with.

The change to Democratic control of the Senate could offer a start. Kyoto was never a genuine partisan issue because many Democrats oppose the treaty, too. Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., the new majority leader, said in April he would support altering the document, including considering a shift from mandatory to voluntary emissions cuts. "I'm not averse to looking at voluntary approaches," Daschle said. "But if you do, there has to be some kind of incentive program that would cause a change in practice or approach."

A leading critic of Bush's greenhouse policy, Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont, cited environmental differences as one reason for leaving the Republican Party, handing control of the Senate to the Democrats. Jeffords now chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee. Bush can reach out to congressional moderates, or the political beating will continue.

Until now, Bush has managed to sidestep the seriousness of the warming debate because Democratic leaders and other critics failed to acknowledge the problems with Kyoto and failed to advance a substantive compromise of their own. The ideal solution would be international agreement on verifiable reductions in greenhouse emissions. Whether that takes the form of mandatory cuts or a complement of credits and incentives to industry is a subject overdue for debate. President Clinton never submitted the treaty to the Senate for ratification because he didn't have the votes. If President Bush has finally convinced himself global warming is real, and if Senate Democrats are as serious about clean air as they are about playing politics, then a meaningful framework for cutting greenhouse gases may be around the corner.

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