Here's an opinion piece about global warming from the Fort Collins Coloradoan. From the article, "It is hard to open up a paper these days without finding yet another article on global climate change. Editorials, letters to the editor, the City Council and even the president have taken up the issue. The information comes so fast, from so many sources, and from so many directions, it must be all but impossible for even the most diligent to keep up. So I thought I would comment from what is probably the most under-represented perspective on this issue: the perspective of a mainstream climate scientist. While a cursory read of the popular media would indicate otherwise, the scientific foundation of global climate change has continued to strengthen over the past two decades. Here is what we know: Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it tends to warm the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels are rising and are presently at concentrations higher than anytime in the last 650,000 years. The rapid rise in global temperature in the last 30 years cannot be accounted for without the inclusion of human influence through fossil-fuel consumption. All of this is to say that when we look to explain the rise in global temperature to date, we do not need to look much farther than ourselves.
"As we look to the future, our climate models project an additional 3 F to 10 F of warming during this century. A warming of 3 F will definitely be noticeable and is something that we should be concerned about. A warming of 10F will, in all likelihood, tear at the fabric of our society. Whether we find ourselves at the low end or the high end of these projections will depend primarily on whether we curtail our fossil-fuel consumption. Having developed climate model for the last 15 years, I have two bits of advice regarding these projections of global warming: do not take them as absolute truth and do not discard them as folly. These projections warrant serious deliberation when considering our future fossil-fuel consumption."
Meanwhile the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change presented their report on climate change earlier today in Paris, according to the Environment News Service. From the article, "Changes in the atmosphere, the oceans, glaciers and ice caps show unequivocally that the Earth is warming, according to the first global assessment of climate change science in six years. The report confirms that the observed increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1750 is the result of human activities. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, concludes that advances in climate modeling and the collection and analysis of data now give scientists 90 percent confidence in their understanding of how human activities are causing the world to warm. This level of confidence is much greater than what could be achieved in 2001 when the IPCC issued its last assessment. Introducing the report today in Paris, Dr. Susan Solomon, an American atmospheric chemist, said it is 'very likely,' a 90 percent probability, that most of the observed increase in temperatures is due to the observed increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. The 2001 assessment said it was 'likely,' a probability of 66 percent. The rapid rise in global concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases, is so different from the patterns for thousands of years previous, 'there is no doubt that increase is dominated by human activity,' said Solomon, who helped to identify the mechanism that created the Antarctic ozone hole."
According to The Guardian, "Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today. Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."
"2008 pres"
5:35:30 AM 
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