[Marxism] Panel Shifts Stance On Global Warming

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.



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