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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Experts hope a startling new report will be enough to persuade President Bush to take action.
Jan 26, 2001 | After this week's release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report on global warming -- the strongest scientific evidence ever linking climate change to man's activities -- environmentalists and scientists say the time has come for President Bush to come up with a policy to address this slow-moving ecological crisis.
The study predicts that the Earth's temperature could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. In fact, it says we just exited the warmest decade in the last 140 years.
While there's been little doubt that the climate is indeed warming -- glaciers are retreating, sea levels are rising, precipitation is changing -- there have been some high-profile skeptics, Bush included. They question the science linking this general warming trend to things that humans do, such as burning fossil fuel, which releases carbon dioxide. The increase of carbon dioxide and methane, another greenhouse gas, is believed to enhance the "greenhouse effect" that traps heat in Earth's atmosphere that otherwise would be released.
"I don't think we know the solution to global warming yet and I don't think we've got all the facts," said Bush during his second presidential debate. (The president's office did not return phone calls from Salon seeking comment on his current position.)
The new report states emphatically that "most" of the warming, especially over the last 50 years, is attributable to human activity, and not to natural occurrences such as normal climate variations from one decade to another, changes in sunlight or volcanic activity, which can cool the atmosphere.
"I would hope that the Bush administration will read our report very carefully and look at the implications [of our findings]," says Robert Watson, chairman of the IPCC panel.
