A worldwide rise in Earth’s surface temperatures is “undoubtedly real” and appears to have sped up over the last 20 years, according to a major new report released yesterday by a panel of the National Research Council. The panel estimated that temperatures over the last century rose between 0.7 and 1.4 degrees F, a 30 percent increase from earlier projections that reflects the record-shattering temperatures of the late 1990s. The report also partly refuted a key argument used by global warming skeptics, dismissing as insignificant the contradictions between data from land-based weather stations, which have observed warming, and data from satellites monitoring the upper atmosphere, which have found little or no warming. Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund: “It completely deflates the argument that contrarians have been using in support of the position that global warming isn’t worth dealing with.”
