By George H. Taylor.
Climate change is a serious public issue.
So it's only natural that many people are alarmed by foreboding visions of rising sea levels, winter floods, and severe droughts in the United States that appears in a Government report on the effects of global warming. But what has become increasingly evident since a draft of the report was released in May is how little we know about planet-wide changes from global warming, let alone the effects on specific geographic regions. The worst course of action at the present time would be for unsettled science to lead to bad policy. And that could happen, if the federal report, called the National Assessment Synthesis Report, becomes the basis for public policy. Until recently, scientific opinion seemed to be almost unanimous on global warming.