Once again Cal Thomas has written a misleading column on what he calls "the global warming cultists" (Dec 26).
Global warming is a fact, not because Al Gore says so, but because the average temperatures of the planet are higher now than they were a century ago, and the trend has been increasing in the past couple of decades. How much of this rise in temperature is due to human activity cannot be measured precisely, but the fact that carbon dioxide is at a higher concentration in our atmosphere now than at any time in the last thousand years or more (as measured in ice cores) is strong evidence that this is not a normal oscillation and that human activity is the main culprit. This has led the vast majority of climatologists around the world to believe that we are causing most of the global warming. How warm will our planet get, and what effects will this have? Because weather is a chaotic system, this cannot be predicted absolutely, but we can already see the polar ice caps melting, and most computer models for our future weather do not look good.
The debate among scientists is not whether global warming is a reality, or whether human activity is contributing to it; the debate is about how bad it will get and what we can do to minimize its effects.
The Rest (of this Boo Hoo story) Here: