Rush to Judgment.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: National Research Council report on golbal warming - Brief Article

In January, the National Research Council, the working arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released a report called Reconciling Observations of Global Temperature Change. The most quoted line asserted that the increases in the Earth's surface temperatures over the past century are "undoubtedly real." For Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, this ends the global warming debate. "It totally deflates the argument of the so-called skeptics that had used the apparent difference between ground-based and satellite data to argue that we really didn't know whether the world is warming or not," he crowed to The Washington Post. The Post's editorial page concluded that "denials that warming has happened are just plain wrong....Some kind of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is urgent."

Case closed? Not quite. John Christy, the NASA climatologist who is the principal investigator for satellite temperature measurements, says that the NRC report--which he helped put together--simply concludes that the surface of the earth has warmed over the last century. This has never been in dispute, even by global-warming skeptics. The report also concluded that surface temperatures in the past two decades have risen at a rate substantially greater than average for the past 100 years. However, Christy notes that the recent rate of increase in surface temperatures is in fact less than it was in the...