World is getting hotter faster: US lawmakers
Hitting hard at global warming sceptics, powerful US lawmakers have accused them of ''engaging in a policy of distraction'' by promoting hacked e-mails which claimed that scientists had exaggerated the crisis and asserted that the world is getting hotter faster.
Three lawmakers from the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming stated this in a news conference organised in response to controversy over hackers gaining access to documents of the climate research centre of the UK-based East Anglia University and leaking confidential data, including thousands of e-mails, between scientists in UK and US over the past 10 years.
Reacting to the scandal, known as 'climate gate' which led to accusations that researchers had exaggerated the crisis, the powerful Congressmen said the e-mails do nothing to refute the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing global warming.
"Global-warming deniers are trying to say this is all a trick. But the truth of the matter is that our world is getting hotter faster. New temperature findings by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have found that 2009 is on track to be the fifth-warmest year on record, and that this decade is already the warmest decade on record," said Congressman Edward Markey, Chairman of the Select Panel.
"These new findings buttress the overwhelming scientific record that global warming is real and it is accelerating. Even if the tree-ring data set in question is ignored, the stolen e-mails do not alter the multiple lines of independent scientific evidence for human-caused global warming," Markey asserted.
"In fact, the National Academy of Sciences confirms the findings that 20th century warmth in the northern hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years."
Markey alleged that it is coalition of paid-for deniers that is trying to distract way from the central set of actions, which the US should be taking to create a clean-job revolution in the country.
"That's what their agenda is all about. That's what this fight is about. And we don't expect this to be an easy fight, because it's the same coalition that we saw in the past on tobacco and other issues," he said.
Since 2001, all the years have been in the top 10 hottest years on record. This decade is the hottest on record, beating out the 1990s by a substantial margin, he said.
"We go to Copenhagen with the challenge of actually not only reassuring people who are concerned about the United States' commitment, notwithstanding what the administration has done, but then we have to counter some of our own colleagues, who should be concerned about the energy waste and the problems that face the planet...," said Congressman Earl Blumenauer.
Markey, Blumenauer and the third lawmaker, Jay Inslee, accused the global warming sceptics of engaging in a policy of distraction" by promoting the hacked e-mails. PTI LKJ KIM 12111334
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Key senators nearing compromise on US climate legislation
Three key US senators has said they had the outlines of a compromise on far-reaching climate legislation that has been stalled for weeks in the Senate.
Senators John Kerry, a Democrat, Joe Lieberman, an Independent, and Lindsey Graham, a Republican, released a four-page "framework" that they said would help wean the US off its dependence on foreign energy sources and protect the economy.
The compromise endorsed President Barack Obama's target of cutting US greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005-levels by 2020. It gives the president some added momentum ahead of his travel to the Copenhagen climate change summit next week.
"The framework we are releasing today is a starting point for our negotiations going forward," Kerry said Thursday. Governments meeting in Copenhagen should take the message that "the United States Senate is committed to addressing this challenge".
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs welcomed the compromise as a "positive development towards reaching a strong, unified and bipartisan agreement in the US Senate".
The House of Representatives approved similar legislation in the spring, but it has struggled to make headway over the past few months in the Senate.
