Climate-change dissenters: excerpts from a recent Senate report and from elsewhere reveal that hundreds of scientists question the idea that humans cause global warming.(GLOBAL WARMING)

For the internationalist and environmentalist crowd, global warming is no longer about science. Instead, it is about consensus. The United Nations, through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), argues that the world's scientists are unanimous: global warming, unless it is stopped, is an unprecedented worldwide catastrophe. Yvo de Boer, the world body's top climate official, went so far as to warn, according to USA Today, "that ignoring the urgency of global warming would be 'criminally irresponsible.'"

If that is the case, then the UN will need to find a way to lock up hundreds of scientists. That's because, contrary to the UN propagated myth of consensus, there are many scientists who fundamentally disagree with the idea that human activity is causing the planet to heat up. In fact, a recent report compiled by Senator Inhofe and the minority members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works cited and quoted "over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries" who "recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming."

The report has received scant coverage in the media, yet its release on December 20, 2007 was a landmark event coming as it did shortly after the closure of the Bali Conference on Climate Change at which the Bush administration pledged to work toward a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Replacing Kyoto is predicated on the idea that there is no further debate about the climate. But as the Senate report, excerpted below with a few additions, overwhelmingly demonstrates, the debate over climate change not only is far from over, but the "skeptics" increasingly seem to have the balance of observational and theoretical findings in their favor.

The new and growing consensus may turn out to be that the man-made global-warming hypothesis so prevalent over the last two decades or more is nothing but a lot of hyperventilation and hot air.

The Sun and Global Warming

Dr. Nir Shaviv

Astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem