Here's a few gems from the hearing: "The ringers (i.e., nonscientists) at last week’s hearing weren’t of quite the same caliber, but their prepared testimony still had some memorable moments. One was the lawyer’s declaration that the E.P.A. can’t declare that greenhouse gas emissions are a health threat, because these emissions have been rising for a century, but public health has improved over the same period. I am not making this up. Oh, and the marketing professor, in providing a list of past cases of “analogies to the alarm over dangerous manmade global warming” — presumably intended to show why we should ignore the worriers — included problems such as acid rain and the ozone hole that have been contained precisely thanks to environmental regulation. "
It's really sad that there is an illusion of a controversy about this issue. The data points to the fact that the climate is changing, and global atmospheric and ocean temperatures are increasing. The controversy regards how much is due to C02 and how quickly it will continue to rise. I think most people aren't aware of the fact that historically speaking, on average, we are in a cool period for the earth. The arctic has been balmy and the equator has been under ice. There's no reason to think that big shifts won't happen again. The earth does it all the time. I like NASA's climate change site: http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/