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Panel Shifts Stance On Global Warming
By ANTONIO REGALADO Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The world's largest organization of earth, ocean and climate scientists says it is now "virtually certain" that global warming is being caused by emissions of greenhouse gases and that the warming will continue.
The new position statement, released Wednesday by the American Geophysical Union, is a departure from its previous position, which left open the possibility that natural variation was causing recent temperature increases. The shift may further isolate skeptics who have argued that rising global temperatures may not be due to the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.
"This is an unambiguous statement that human effects have been identified," said Marvin Geller, an atmosphere researcher at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who chaired the AGU's Climate Change Panel, which released the position statement. The AGU's statement reflects evidence accumulated since the group's last policy statement in 1998, he says. The AGU represents 41,000 scientists world-wide.
No scientific theory is ever beyond question, and opponents of regulatory solutions to the warming problem have seized on uncertainties. Just last week, Sen. James Inhofe, (R. Okla.), and other members of the Senate and House held a news conference at a United Nations global-warming conference in Milan at which they repeated their argument that big scientific questions remain about whether humans are contributing to climate change. "The science is flawed; it is anything but certain," Sen. Inhofe said, criticizing the Kyoto Protocol, the proposed international treaty curbing global-warming emissions from industrialized nations.
The scientific committee that drafted the statement includes John Christy, a University of Alabama, Huntsville, climatologist who has often sided with warming skeptics in the past. But scientific dissent now increasingly involves details of the warming phenomenon, not the basic result that man-made gas emissions are a probable cause of the warming trend.