Cracks in the Facade: Global Warming in the Gray Lady

It's Getting Hot in Herre

The NYTimes editorial board takes an overview of the global warming/climate change issue in its online Talking Points section (which takes a survey approach to a hot topic, looking at several sides of an issue--and more often than not, debunking the conservative spin). As it's hidden behind the Times Select subscription firewall, I'll excerpt some pieces of this longish overview over the next few days, starting with the debate over the debate about whether humans are causing global warming (which really seems to be a non-debate).

The leading scientific organizations with relevant expertise have overwhelmingly adopted the view that human-induced global warming is a serious problem. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has mobilized hundreds of scientists to analyze the evidence, has gotten progressively more concerned; it now holds humans responsible for most of the warming observed over the past 50 years. The science academies of the United States and 10 other industrial nations issued a joint statement last year citing "strong evidence that significant global warming is occurring" and calling for "prompt action" to combat it. The American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union have all chimed in with similar statements. Only the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, with deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, has demurred.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of research reports in leading scientific journals tend to support the prevailing view that human activities are mostly responsible for driving up temperatures. An analysis of 928 abstracts from leading scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 found that about 20 per cent explicitly endorsed that consensus, another 55 per cent implicitly accepted it and went on to evaluate impacts or propose mitigation strategies, and the remaining 25 per cent took no position. Not a single paper disagreed with the consensus. A rebuttal survey by a British social anthropologist found fewer papers that endorsed the consensus and 34 that rejected or doubted it, but that survey in turn was sharply criticized for distorting what the abstracts actually said.
Still, there is plenty of disagreement over how fast the climate will change and how dire the consequences might be. In Canada, which is having its own climate-change debate, some 60 scientists signed an open letter in April decrying the "alarmist forecasts" of the United Nations and suggesting that concern over greenhouse gases should actually be diminishing. They were countered by an open letter from 90 other scientists endorsing the U.N. consensus and calling for a national strategy to deal with climate change.

[PS] I just noticed that Tom Friedman (NYTimes columnist and best-selling author has had his recent Discovery special (Addicted to Oil) has been excerpted over at YouTube. Here's the first section, embedded for your perusal.