Article published June 28, 2006
Warming to the challenge
THE U.S. National Academy of Sciences is renowned for its sobriety. There isn’t a dilettante or wild-eyed celebrity tree-hugger in the bunch.
When the U.S. Congress needed honest brokers to undertake a systematic review of the data on global warming, it turned to the National Academy to cut through the partisan dust and propaganda being kicked up in what has become a cyclical debate in Washington.
Last week, scientists at the NAS issued a 141-page report on global warming that didn’t leave an inch of wiggle room for skeptics of climate change. According to the report, the Earth is the hottest it has been in 400 years — thanks to human and industrial activity.
The Northern Hemisphere is at its warmest point in 2,000 years and doesn’t appear to be in a hurry to break the one-degree “fever” it picked up in the 20th century.
Instead of debunking previous reports on global warming for excessive pessimism, the academy confirmed that research from the 1990s was “very close to being right.”
Reputable scientists, at least those not on the payroll of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, have long agreed that global warming is primarily the result of human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. For decades, the naysayers have defied this consensus by insisting that warming trends are cyclical and that mankind isn’t capable of knocking Mother Nature out of balance with greenhouse emissions.
Two years ago, novelist Michael Crichton gave voice to this sentiment in State of Fear, a best-seller that suggested that global warming is based on the lies of environmental extremists out to sabotage human progress. President Bush was so impressed by the book’s wacky premise that he invited Mr. Crichton to the White House.
Between repudiating the Kyoto emissions accord and endorsing Mr. Crichton’s book, the Bush Administration was signaling its impatience with the scientific consensus on climate change.
Recently a new political consensus has begun to grow (Hurricane Katrina may have had something to do with it). Conservatives who were once skeptics are now more inclined to examine the evidence. Evangelicals have begun claiming the environment as a “stewardship” issue.
Even Mr. Bush appears to have reluctantly conceded the existence of global warming, though he prefers market-driven solutions to the problem.
Between the National Academy’s report and former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, global warming has come into its own as a political, if not moral, issue.
As hard as it is to get the naysayers to agree that there’s a problem, it will be twice as hard to build consensus for real action. But that needs to become part of the American agenda — now.
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