John Kerry examines today’s environmentalists

Today, in fact, nearly every researcher professionally engaged in the study of climate change, from across the political and ideological spectrum, agrees that the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity is responsible for the current warming trend. At a climate change symposium hosted by the New York Botanical Gardens in September 2006, one scientist described the feeling among climate scientists in these plain terms: “The more one reads and understands the proven science about global warming, the more terrified one becomes.”

Another leading scientist, Dr. John Holdren, has been studying the causes and consequences of global environmental changes for more than thirty-five years. He is currently the director of the Woods Hole Research Center and a professor at Harvard University in both the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. In 1995, as Chair of the Executive Committee, heaccepted a Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the Pugwash Conferences.

Sitting in his office at Harvard recently, he explained that skepticism about this issue has largely abated in recent years. “To be credible,” he said, “the skeptics about human causation of current global climate change would need both to explain what alternative mechanism could account for the pattern of changes that is being observed, and explain how it could be that the known, human-caused buildup in greenhouse gases is not having the effects predicted for it by the sum of current climate-science knowledge (since, by the skeptics’ assumption, something else is having these effects). No skeptic has met either test.”

In fact, even the Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush administration has endorsed this conclusion. In May 2002, the EPA published a report stating, “There is general agreement that the observed warming is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years . . . due mostly to human activity.” That sentiment was again reiterated in a statement issued in June 2006 by eleven national academies of science, including that of the United States. Their joint statement said that “the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify taking prompt action.” Similar conclusions have been expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others.

It seems that new scientific evidence about the urgent threat of climate change is being released on nearly a daily basis. But it is not just scientists who are learning more about the problem. Al Gore’s book and documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, masterfully explained the global warming threat to a wider audience, exposing millions of people to the harsh realities of this challenge. For people the world over, the scientists’ theories should come as no surprise: One doesn’t have to read the reports or even study the science to understand the dangerous effects of climate change, because the effects are already upon us. In many places, it’s simply enough to walk outdoors and look around.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, average temperatures in the U.S. in 2006 were 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the twentieth-century mean. In 2006, the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States, a summer heat wave blanketed large swaths of the country. In California, more than 130 people died as a result of the heat. Chicago officials were forced to evacuate hundreds of families from buildings in the city’s South Side that had lost power as temperatures climbed into the 90s for a fifth straight day. As the Northeast braced for temperatures to soar above 100 degrees, the lights atop the Empire State Building and the East River Bridges in New York City were switched off to save power. The city, fearing an overload of the energy grid, was trying to prevent a potential blackout as millions of New Yorkers sought refuge from the heat by cranking up their air conditioning.

Winters are also getting warmer. Ice on lakes is freezing later and melting earlier in the season. During a few recent winters, New England’s Lake Champlain — renowned for its ice fishing — did not freeze at all. And, of course, this warming knows no borders. The summer of 2003 in Europe was the hottest on record, and probably the hottest there in at least 500 years. A brutal heat wave in the first half of August, in which temperatures reached a record 100.2 degrees Fahrenheit in England and 104 degrees in France, claimed an estimated 35,000 lives.

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