Group's summary overheats warming threat By Kenneth Green, D. Env. Every other November, groups representing governments, environmentalists, industry and others attend an international meeting to plan global warming policy. This year, they're meeting in the Hague.
Many people worry about disastrous changes in climate and see recent omens as troubling.
Changing temperatures near the Earth's surface suggest the climate, largely stable for the last 10,000 years, is resuming older, more mercurial patterns. There's been a noticeable global warming trend during the last 100 years, and there's evidence suggesting that humanity may have caused some still-unknown portion of that increase by changing levels of forestation and by emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That worthy document is written by several hundred climate investigators and reviewed by several thousand other experts, myself included. The summary, on the other hand, is written by a few high-level members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and is reviewed mainly by politicians. Taking the leaked summary at face value, headlines have blared that scientists predict worse warming than before, with predicted future temperatures rising from the 4.5 degrees Centigrade of the last landmark report to a possible 6.5 degrees Centigrade of warming by 2100.