Global Warming

I want to start by thanking the members of your board for sponsoring this panel discussion on global warming – a subject that deserves far more of our attention than it usually gets. And to thank them for inviting me to participate. I’m no Al Gore, but the subject is one I feel passionately about, and I am

always happy to be a part of any forum that raises our collective awareness about the seriousness of the issue.

 Officially, this is to be a panel discussion of the quote Global Warming Controversy unquote. Although I appreciate the value of such a provocative title in promoting attendance, it is somewhat misleading – in my opinion – and the main purpose of my opening remarks will be to try and convince you that there is, in fact, no controversy. The perception that there is a controversy is perpetuated mainly by the popular media whose striving to appear even-handed means they continue to print contrary opinions by increasingly marginalized scientists, thereby perpetuating the myth that there is an ongoing controversy about the facts and causes of global warming. This situation is worsened because the people who do have the facts – the scientists – don’t seem to know how to communicate to the public, and the special interest groups who excel at swaying public opinion aren’t doing so with the facts.

Whatever may have been true thirty years ago, today there is no scientific debate about the reality of – or the causes of – global warming. None. In fact, in a study published in prestigious journal Science, scientist Naomi Oreskes analyzed all papers that have been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals with the key word “global climate change” over the decade ending in 2003 and found that none – not a single one – argued against the fact of “anthropogenic global climate change.” There are a few scientists and pseudoscientific organizations still dithering about lack of evidence, but the scientific community is overwhelmingly in agreement that the evidence for human-induced global warming is clear and persuasive.

 I want to briefly go over the evidence just so we can put that to bed and move on to the debate the country should be having, namely, what can we do about it. So what is global warming and how do we know it’s happening? The term global warming is generally used to indicate a rise in the average temperature of the planet’s surface, and there are several direct indicators that a major warming trend is in progress. The temperature record shows, for example, that the top 10 hottest years on record occurred since 1989. The record also shows that the average temperature has risen about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century alone, and that the temperature is rising even more rapidly at the two poles – there the average temperatures have risen to five