The 41,000-member American Geophysical Union (AGU) has come down squarely on the side of those worried about looming climate change, although it stopped well short of alarm. "Human activities are increasingly altering the Earth's climate," reads a new position statement released this week by the 28-member AGU Council. "Scientific evidence strongly indicates" that humans have played a role in the rapid warming of the past half-century, it says. And "it is virtually certain" that increasing greenhouse gases will warm the planet. Human influences on climate "constitute a real basis for concern." The society also dumped the neutrally worded title of its previous statement--"Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases"--in favor of the blunter "Human Impacts on Climate."
But the statement--which is carefully worded to avoid the favorite talking points of greenhouse contrarians--does concede the difficulty of predicting how fast, how much, and where climate will change. The uncertainty sets up AGU's final pitch: More funding is needed for enhanced research, observations, computer modeling, and training.
