Year of Global Cooling

4 Responses to “Year of Global Cooling”

1. Michelle on December 23rd, 2007 9:45 am

   Anwaar, I think it is a great error to post articles such as this and some others that you have posted. In these days of disinformation, one has to carefully check the background of sources and with whom they are in bed with. We are bombarded with news stories daily and in the rush to put information out, we are doing a disservice toward thoughtful consideration of world events and statements put out by “authorities.” In the past, it took years for great minds to come up with information and scientific thought. Some of our best thinkers only wrote a few books in their lifetime. Now, uncontested thought is thrown out into the universe of the public, reported on, and without giving us time to digest this information, we are rushed along to the next story.

   What I have put together here is a bit long, but necessary. If you wish, you may put it up as a stand alone in response to David Deming’s article.

   The author of this article, David Deming, is one of the scientists whose signature appears in the following, posted previously here at TS:

   Over 100 Prominent Scientists Warn UN: Attempting To Control Climate Is ‘Futile’
   Post Information
   Posted: December 14th, 2007
   Categories: Humanity & Global Civilization, Science, Environment

   Posted by: Anwaar Hussain
   2608 Words here
   CLIP:
   The scientists, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists, released an open letter to the UN Secretary-General questioning the scientific basis for climate fears and the UN’s so-called “solutions.”
   The following are signatories to the Dec. 13th letter to the Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations on the UN Climate conference in BaliIan D. Clark, PhD, Professor, isotope hydrogeology and paleoclimatology, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa

   Richard S. Courtney, PhD, climate and atmospheric science consultant, IPCC expert reviewer, U.K.

   Willem de Lange, PhD, Dept. of Earth and Ocean Sciences, School of Science and Engineering, Waikato University, New Zealand

   David Deming, PhD (Geophysics), Associate Professor, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oklahoma
   END CLIP

   Curiously, within the signatories of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming, one finds names from the now defunct Global Climate Coalition. During the 1990s U.S. oil companies and other corporations funded a group called the Global Climate Coalition [GCC], which emphasized uncertainties in climate science and disputed the need to take action. It was disbanded when President Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto process. The group’s website now says: “The industry voice on climate change has served its purpose by contributing to a new national approach to global warming.”

   You can compare names found in the list of Over 100 Prominent Scientists Warn UN: Attempting To Control Climate Is ‘Futile’, found here:
   Signatories of an open letter on the UN climate conference:
   http://www.nationalpost.com/mo.....?id=164004

   To Affiliated Individuals of the GCC found here:
   http://www.ucsusa.org/global_w.....tions.html

   Here is more information about The GCC and its membership:
   From: http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind....._Coalition
   CLIP:
   GCC members collectively represent more than 6 million businesses, companies and corporations in virtually every sector of U.S. business, agriculture and forestry, including electric utilities, railroads, transportation, manufacturing, small businesses, mining, oil, and coal.

   As a leading voice for business and industry, both domestically and internationally, GCC volunteers and staff attend all international climate change negotiations. They also closely monitor the activities of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and contributes to the IPCC’s scientific assessment documents.
   Domestically, the GCC represents the views of its members to legislative bodies and policymakers. And it reviews and provides comments on proposed legislation and government programs.

   Businesses and industries that make up the GCC’s member trade associations are active participants in voluntary programs for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that are part of the federal government’s U.S. Climate Action Plan.

   Funding
   The GCC website was decorated with numerous photos of happy children playing in idyllic farm fields, but it did not provide any information about its budget or where its money comes from. GCC was not registered as a nonprofit organization and was not required to make public disclosures of its IRS tax filings, so it is difficult to obtain even basic information about its finances. However, the information that is publicly available shows that the GCC has spent tens of millions of dollars on the global warming issue.

   According to the Los Angeles Times (December 7, 1997) the GCC spent $13 million on its 1997 anti-Kyoto ad campaign, an amount roughly equivalent to Greenpeace’s entire annual budget.

   Common Cause has documented more than $63 million in contributions to politicians from members of the Global Climate Coalition from 1989-1999.[1]

   GCC’s efforts were coordinated with separate campaigns by many of its members, such as the National Coal Association, which spent more than $700,000 on the global climate issue in 1992 and 1993, and the American Petroleum Institute, which paid the Burson-Marsteller PR firm $1.8 million in 1993 for a successful computer-driven “grassroots” letter and phone-in campaign to stop a proposed tax on fossil fuels.

   GCC’s members and supporters included the following companies and trade associations:

   Air Transport Association
   Allegheny Power
   Aluminum Association, Inc.
   American Automobile Manufacturers Association
   American Commercial Barge Line Co.
   American Farm Bureau Federation
   American Forest & Paper Association
   American Highway Users Alliance
   American Iron and Steel Institute
   American Petroleum Institute
   American Portland Cement Alliance
   Amoco
   Association of American Railroads
   Association of International Automobile Manufacturers
   Atlantic Richfield Coal Company
   Baker Refineries
   Bethlehem Steel
   BHP Minerals
   Chamber of Shipping of America
   Chemical Manufacturers Association
   Chevron
   Chrysler Corporation
   Cinergy
   CONRAIL
   Consumers Energy
   Council of Industrial Boiler Owners
   CSX Transportation, Inc.
   Cyprus-Amax
   Dow Chemical Company
   Drummond Company
   Duke Power Company
   DuPont
   Eastman Chemical
   Edison Electric Institute
   ELCON
   ExxonMobil
   Fertilizer Institute
   Ford Motor Company
   General Motors
   Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.
   Greencool
   Hoechst Celanese Chemical Group
   Illinois Power Company
   Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corp.
   McDonnell-Douglas
   Mobil Corporation
   National Association of Manufacturers
   National Lime Association
   National Mining Association
   National Ocean Industries Association
   National Petrochemical and Refiners Association
   Natural Rural Electric Cooperative Association
   Norfolk Southern
   Northern Indiana Public Serv. Co.
   Ohio Edison
   Parker Drilling Company
   Process Gas Consumers
   Shell
   Society of the Plastic Industry
   Southern Company
   Steel Manufacturers Association
   TECO Energy Inc.
   Texaco
   U.S. Chamber of Commerce
   USX Corporation
   Union Carbide
   Union Pacific
   Virginia Power
   Western Fuels Association
   END CLIP

   Now here is Deming’s official statement on global warming:

   David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: “The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause–human or natural–is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.”[55]
   List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming
   From Wikipedia,
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....al_warming

   Most of the scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warming ignore further research by oceanographers and their data. Please note the info on the THE IPCC’s BIG MISCALCULATION in the clip below, which also, by the way, debunks the “irrational hysteria,” of Deming’s comment:

   Re: Global Warming
   « Reply #18 on Apr 23, 2007, 4:16pm »
   FLIPPING THE SWITCH ON CLIMATE CHANGE, HOAXES & CYCLES
   by William Thomas
   FROM: http://tinyurl.com/237gcl
   CLIP:
   GLACIAL INDIFFERENCE

   It’s not easy debating a destabilizing 10,000-foot thick glacier. Despite sea levels and melting polar ice-sheets already at the upper limits of the next 30 year projections, another 500,000 square miles of reflective Arctic sea ice melted into heat-retaining dark water and Alaska’s glaciers decanting more than 13 trillion gallons of meltwater into world ocean circulations each year, and Greenland’s fast-shrinking 2,000 kilometres of solid ice increasing its melting rate over the past five years from a metre a year to a metre a month, and polar bears drowning a hundred miles offshore while looking for ice floes retreating another 300 miles out, and thousands of Canadian harp seal pups experiencing 100% mortality from the same lack of ice, and the first month of 2007 3.4°F hotter than the any January ever recorded and the snowpack serving drinking water to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest shrinking toward bare rock and more than a quarter of the American West in either severe or exceptionally severe drought while Arizona cactus wither and die from lack of water—Inhofe and the White House insist, this planet can’t be heating up! [Reuters Mar 23/07; CBC Aug 3; Aug 20/04; BBC Radio 4 Aug 7/05; Independent Oct 2/05; Knight Ridder News Service July31/03; New York Times Mar 10/06; http://www.cejnewsviews.blogspot.com/ - http://www.realclimate.org ]

   On the other hand, an 18-inch rise in sea level will see salt water flowing into the Sacramento River Delta, destroying the drinking water for 23 million Californians. A 20-foot ocean level rise will put half of Florida under water— including Miami, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville—along with the new WTC memorial in Manhattan, and much of Washington DC, where Senator Inhofe is busily blocking climate change-inspired discourse, dancing and music. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer Mar 11/07; BBC July28/04]

   In more than 180 countries, one out of every ten people on this planet could soon be chuckling over the climate change hoax while swimming inland. Fortunately for U.S. legislators like Inhofe, only one of these countries is the United States. The rest—China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt, Thailand and the Philippines have mostly expendable non-white populations who don’t buy much stuff from the United States, which today mostly exports self-deluding fictions, weapons and wars. [Inter Press Service Mar 28/07]

   Meanwhile, the rapidly melting and slip-sliding Greenland ice sheet does not know it is a hoax and is set to raise world sea levels 20 to 30 feet, while far to the south, inland Western Antarctic glaciers uncorked by the calving Larson ice shelf are rushing to add another 20-feet or so to the rising sea level hoax. As for the melting Eastern Antarctic, think about relocating to a mountaintop with a dock in your front yard.

   OCEANS ‘R’ US

   Onboard a lonesome space colony that is more Ocean than Earth, the gigantic saltwater buffer covering 70% of its surface is absorbing half of our carbon folly every day. This is good and not so good, because the resulting hot water is shutting down nutrient-rich water columns and helping megatons of farm fertilizer runoff create vast fishless Dead Zones off the coast of California and Oregon every year for the last five years. Dead zones are also blooming in the waters off Chile, Namibia and South Africa. Nearly 50% of the world’s fisheries are in these areas. [BBC News Feb 17/07]

   Even worse, in contributing to a 25 million ton carbon deposit into the One World Ocean every day, we are seeing a resulting carbonic reaction that is rapidly turning this whole watery wilderness into acid. [ http://www.earthfiles.com Aug 13/04; Agence France-Presse July 20/05 ]

   And our oceanic carbon contributions are increasing rapidly.

   Meanwhile, the global warming hoax so stridently opposed by Senator Inhofe and his cohorts can only mean that temperatures in Eastern Europe are not averaging 8° Fahrenheit above normal, even though they are. Canada on average is more than 5 degrees warmer than normal, and hoax-ridden Siberia is 9°F hotter than usual. [Agence France-Presse Feb 16/07; AP Feb 16/07]

   FOR PEAT’s SAKE

   This is a scream because the world’s largest frozen peat bog stretches for a million square kilometres across western Siberia’s once permanently frosty permafrost. Warming faster than almost anywhere else on Earth, this time bomb tundra contains several hundred billion tons of methane that—if thawed by a few more cheap flights to Mexico—could be burped like a giant cow fart into an atmosphere already overloaded with fast-food bovine flatulence. [NewScientist.com Aug 11/05]

   Thing is, each molecule of methane released into the atmosphere destroys millions of sunshielding ozone molecules. And despite the media-promulgated hoax of ozone layer recovery, last year’s 11 million square miles ozone hole over Antarctica was the biggest ever recorded, with local ozone absence often reaching 99%. No more ozone means no more plankton means no more oceanic carbon scrubbing or oxygen—and no more fishies. [National Science Foundation Press Release Dec 17/03; http://www.greenguerrilla.com/om.htm Agence France-Presse Dec 26/06]

   Another thing: each molecule of methane traps 21 times more heat than a measly molecule of carbon dioxide. [EPA]

   Suddenly—hopefully—that next drive to Burger King may not seem as urgent as leaving the key unturned in our aptly-named ignitions. Because another few degrees rise in global temperatures could release more heat-trapping tundra methane all at once than all the carbon released over the past century. Then the cows and us are hooped. [Baltimore Sun Dec 16/04]

   THE IPCC’s BIG MISCALCULATION

   But hey, relax, Inhofe and his followers invite, and throw another forest on the fire. It turns out that the latest scary Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projections showing an “upper range” temperature increase of about 11°F by this century’s end based on carbon burning trends in places like the USA, Canada and China are yesterday’s baloney.

   Instead, our current situation is much more dire than they predicted. It seems that 1,200 of the world’s best atmospheric scientists forgot to factor in land-based methane releases, which are “emptying at an alarming rate,” according to Chris Freeman of the University of Wales.

   Apparently uninformed that methane levels already rising three-times faster than CO2 cannot really be happening, a frightened Freeman exclaims, “It’s a vicious circle. The problem gets worse and worse, faster and faster” as more methane heats the atmosphere releasing more methane and so on. [National Science Foundation Press Release Dec 17/03; NewScientist.com Aug 11/05]

   Even with tundra terror factor inserted into updated computer models, panicked oceanographers are warning that just a few degrees more ocean warming could release another 2,000 billion tons of frozen methane “clathrates” from the seafloor into the atmosphere. That’s a lot. In fact it’s enough to trigger a sudden “destabilization event”.

   We won’t like it. A NASA study confirmed that 55 million years ago a similarly tremendous underwater methane belch instantly heated Earth’s atmosphere as much as 13° F within a few decades. This messed up critters afloat and ashore, and disrupted climate worldwide for more than 100,000 years.

   Some 200 million years before that, another series of methane releases came close to wiping out all life on Earth. As oxygen levels plummeted and every living creature teeter-tottered on the brink of extinction, more than 94% of marine species headed for off-planet dimensions. It took between 25 and 100 million years for coral reefs and forests to regrow into their former diversity.

   For those of us who don’t like waiting for anything, such an interruption could be extremely inconvenient.

   NOT ALL CYCLES ARE BICYCLES

   These Big Extinction Events—and other periodic warming and cooling episodes—are what people like Inhofe and your neighbors and coworkers unknowingly refer to when they say that climate change is “cyclical”. They’re right. But not in the way they mean.

   For example, about 12,700 years ago average temperatures in lands bordering the North Atlantic abruptly plummeted nearly 5°C and remained that way for 1,300 years. The resulting Younger Dryas is named after a cold-loving Arctic wildflower that flourished in the US and European regions during an era that saw icebergs off the coast of present day Portugal.

   Another abrupt warming took place about 1,000 years ago that allowed Norse voyagers to settle a northern green land. Three centuries later, the Norse abandoned their Greenland settlements when the climate chilled abruptly, with “profound” agricultural, economic, and political impacts in Europe. Over in the USA, the American revolution was nearly aborted by rapid climate shift as George Washington struggled to get his thinly-clad troops across the unexpectedly icebound Delaware River.

   “Rapid changes in ocean circulation are linked to these abrupt climate changes,” Robert Gagosian, President and Director Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution told the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland in January 2003. “A growing body of evidence demonstrating linkages among ocean-related climate shifts, ‘megadroughts’ and precipitous collapses of civilizations, including the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia 4,200 years ago, the Mayan empire in central America 1,500 years ago, and the Anasazi in the American Southwest in the late 13th century.”

   OUT OF CIRCULATION

   Now, unless we immediately embrace a low carbon diet, a lot more folks could soon experience that excitement again. In May 2005, climate change researcher Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, aimed sonar upwards beneath the Arctic ice cap from Royal Navy submarines and correlated ships‚ measurements across the Greenland Sea to detect that one of the biggest “heat pumps” driving the Gulf Stream has weakened to less than a quarter of its former strength.

   “Until recently we would find giant ‘chimneys’ in the sea where columns of cold, dense water were sinking from the surface to the seabed 3,000 metres below, but now they have almost disappeared,” Wadhams said. “As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south, which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing, it will mean less heat reaching Europe.”

   Today, the powerful Gulf Stream that bathes Britain, northern Europe and the northeastern U.S. seaboard in warm waters conveyed from the tropics has slowed by 30% in the last dozen years. According to UK newspapers, “The Gulf Stream delivers the equivalent of 1 million power stations-worth of energy to northern Europe, propping up temperatures by 10°C in some regions. Ireland, Britain and northwestern Europe lie on the same latitude as Siberia.” The shut down of this Gulf Stream “radiator” could lead to a century or more of no frost-free days on the northern European, UK and US Atlantic seaboards—at a time when the end of cheap oil sends fuel oil and food transport costs skyrocketing. [Sunday Times (Ireland) May 8/05; Guardian Dec 1/05]

   Unusually violent solar flares, and Earth’s wobbly axis are peripherally implicated in these major climatic events. The sudden stoppages of “thermohaline” ocean circulations are primarily caused by rapid global warming caused by massive methane releases caused by voluminous volcanic eruptions—are.

   These drastic warming and cooling periods are not really “cyclical” but result from Earth’s intricately interconnected feedback mechanisms that miraculously work to maintain narrow margins of habitability for warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing lifeforms like us.

   So far.

   Unfortunately, as U.S. government geologist John Atcheson observes, “Humans appear to be capable of emitting carbon dioxide in quantities comparable to the volcanic activity that started these chain reactions.” According to the U.S. Geological Survey, burning fossil fuels in cars, jets, ships, wood stoves and power plants has so far released more than 150 times the amount of volcanic carbon dioxide—”The equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes the size of Hawaii’s Kilauea.” [Baltimore Sun Dec 16/04]

   Inhofe stubbornly insists that more than 700 million cars and trucks running their motors inside an eggshell-thin atmosphere as enclosed as any garage are not affecting anything. [Independent Dec 6/03; Globe and Mail Apr11/98]

   Atcheson simply says, “Once these methane releases really get cooking, it’s likely to play out all the way.”

   [Independent Dec 6/03]
   END CLIP

   I think you should carefully research whose articles you chose to post here at Truthspring, Anwaar. Individuals and coalitions mentioned above are advised to steer debate by targeting journalists and bloggers, as well as attending environmental group meetings and events to “share” information on opposing viewpoints and tactics. Many of these individuals are of the most unsavory characters. I can’t help but to post the following on Deming; in my opinion not only is he a shill for industry, but he is also a pig that shouldn’t be listened to:

   FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deming
   Controversy
   CLIP:
   Deming has made a number of statements about women that some have viewed controversial or offensive. In 1998, Deming wrote:
   “There is significant scientific evidence that sex-based differences in spatial and mathematical abilities may be biological in origin. For example, male rats do better in mazes than females. I concede it is possible that those female rats performed poorly because they were distressed by the lack of proper role models, but somehow this seems implausible.”[8]
   Two years later, Deming wrote a letter criticizing Yale University student Joni Kletter’s February 18, 2000 syndicated article on gun control published in the University of Oklahoma’s student newspaper, The Oklahoma Daily. He received a reprimand from Dean of the College of Geoscience, John Snow, after 25 people filed formal complaints about his response in which he stated,[9]

   “I just want to point out that Kletter’s ‘easy access’ to a vagina enables her to ‘quickly and easily’ have sex with ‘as many random people’ as she wants. Her possession of an unregistered vagina also equips her to work as a prostitute and spread venereal diseases. Let’s hope Kletter is as responsible with her equipment as most gun owners are with theirs.”

   Citing academic freedom, the university canceled disciplinary proceedings after Deming threatened to take legal action. Deming said his critics had “no more respect for the first amendment than they do for the second.”[10][11]

   In 2003, his academic duties were restricted and his office moved to a converted laboratory in the basement, away from other members of the faculty.[12] Deming claims that this was the result of, among other things, an editorial he wrote arguing against affirmative action for women.[13] In July 2004, Deming filed a lawsuit against several personnel to restore his position. [14] Deming settled his lawsuit against the University of Oklahoma in 2005. All complaints were dropped and Deming was given a new office. Regarding his victory in court Deming stated, “My attorneys are to be thanked for doing the entire University a service by defending the University’s values better than it did.”[15]
   END CLIP

2. Anwaar on December 23rd, 2007 12:16 pm

   I beg to differ Michelle. In my opinion, there is no error in being informed of all points of view before forming one of our own. The error, on the contrary, lies squarely in forming an opinion on examining only one angle to the issue.

   I guess it was Richard Dawkins who said, “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry”

   Your comment too is being published in the spirit of rational inquiry.

3. Michelle on December 23rd, 2007 4:35 pm

   I have come to the conclusion that precious years have been squandered as some scientists have been censored while compromised scientists and industry funded think tanks and universities have put out less than complete information which is in favor of continued use, as is, of fossil fuels. This has done has done a huge amout of irreversable damage to our planet and may have bought time needed to secure safe or even continued living on our planet for ALL manner of life.

   One must also not forget the wars waged over fossil fuels, loss of human life due to this greed, acidification of rainwater and surface waters from the burning of fossil fuels, damage done to ecosystems done by oil splills, upper terrain and subterrain damage due to to oil extraction, and the economic ‘hostage’ situation of consumers due to surpression of alternative energy; all for the priofits of a few with no regard for future living.

   Infomation of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group of 200,000 scientists and citizens, begs to differ with groups which Deming has alined himself with:

   “On December 11, 2006, the UCS issued a statement signed by 10,600 leading scientists including Nobel laureates.[17] The statement calls for the restoration of scientific integrity to federal policy-making. The announcement came as the group [10] that documents suspected censorship and political interference in federal science.”
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.....Scientists

   The group of: 100 Prominent Scientists Warn UN: Attempting To Control Climate Is ‘Futile’, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC scientists, for some reason, have decided to cast doubt on the IPCC’s findings:

   CLIP FROM:
   Re: Global Warming
   « Reply #21 on Nov 19, 2007, 1:08pm »
   Here it is: the future of the world, in 23 pages
   By Mike McCarthy, Environment Editor
   Published: 19 November 2007
   http://tinyurl.com/237gcl
   It is about the size and weight of a theatre programme and when it was published in Valencia, Spain, at the weekend, the first eagerly grabbed copies were held together by a hastily punched staple. Yet these 23 pages are crucial for the future of the world.

   This is the key document on climate change, and from now on you can forget any others you may have read or seen or heard about. This is the one that matters. It is the tightly distilled, peer-reviewed research of several thousand scientists, fully endorsed, without qualification, by all the world’s major governments. Its official name is a mouthful: the Policymakers’ Summary of the Synthesis Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment. So let’s just call it The Synthesis.

   It is so important because it provides one concise, easily-readable but comprehensive text of facts, figures and diagrams – in short all the information you need to understand and act on the threat of global warming, be you a politician, a businessman, an activist or a citizen (or for that matter, a doubter).

   The Synthesis has been distilled from more than 3,000 pages of research published in the three separate parts of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, or AR4, during the course of 2007 – on the science of climate change, on its potential impacts, and the possible remedies.

   These individual sections – published in Paris in February, in Brussels in April and in Bangkok in May – spelled out comprehensively that the Earth could warm by an average of up to 6C during the course of the coming century, and that this would be catastrophic in its impact for human society, most of all the poor in developing countries; but they also offered hope that the problem was solvable, if the governments took rapid and decisive action to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions causing the warming.

   The IPCC, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize this year (along with Al Gore) for its efforts to raise awareness of climate change, was set up by the UN in 1988 and published its first assessment, sounding the initial warning about rising temperatures, in 1990; it issued subsequent reports in 1995 and 2001. But this year’s fourth assessment has an importance all its own.

   For it is the one where scientists now feel confident enough to declare that the warming world is a phenomenon beyond all doubt, and that the likelihood of this being caused by the human actions of putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere – and not say, by increased solar activity, as some have argued – is greater than 90 per cent.

   For all but the most perverse of sceptics, it ends the basic argument. And it also urgently warns that the risks are greater, and possibly closer in time, than was appreciated even six years ago, when the third assessment was published.

   It is chapter and verse, it is Holy Writ: you may not agree with it, but this (backed up by the full reports) is what the world scientific community thinks. Its opening words are magisterial – almost Biblical – in tone. “Warming of the climate system,” it pronounces, “is unequivocal”. It goes on to spell out that the atmosphere is rapidly warming, snow and ice are melting across the world, and the global sea level is rising at an increasing rate; yet the problem is solvable if governments act decisively.
   END CLIP

   If I might ask, what “opinion” have you formed on Global Warming?

4. Anwaar on December 23rd, 2007 6:02 pm

   My “opinion” at this stage? Global warming indeed is taking place.

   Can’t say what it will eventually be as I get further informed by reading all points of view.

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