As the Obama administration takes shape, one important issue that will come to the fore is climate change. On this issue, like so many others, the Bush administration was rather schizoid: Bush himself acknowledged the "reality" of global warming, thereby ceding the issue on principle, but his sounder instincts caused him and his administration to drag their feet on doing anything that would be ruinous to the economy. Obama so far has displayed no such ambivalence. At present, there is no reason to doubt that his administration will try to implement severe measures in hopes of changing the world's weather.
So it is vitally important to revisit the argument over whether climate change, a constant throughout the earth's history, is driven principally by human activities and therefore lies largely within human control. The go-to source on this question is the Science and Environmental Policy Project. This is an excellent summary (Part 1, more to follow) from SEPP on the central issue in the global warming controversy: does the observed "footprint" of warming in recent decades correspond to the temperature patterns that are predicted by the computer models that ostensibly support the anthropogenic global warming theory?
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