One organization that has consistently questioned both the human connection to global warming and the potential harm of the phenomenon is the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. During the Senate hearing - convened by the subcommittee on science, technology and space and examining the newly released Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report - Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., read from a statement by Jeff Keuter, the institute's executive director.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report can only tell us for certain that the Arctic is changing, Keuter said. The report's projections into the future are nothing more than science advocacy used to promote climate alarmism.

The conclusion of the ACIA report is Earth's north pole region is warming faster than the planet in general, a development that could have far-reaching implications for agriculture and commerce as well as weather.

George Marshall was a great American, McCain said, noting it was difficult for him to hear the general's name used in this disgraceful fashion. In other words, the senator reacted quite negatively to the institute's position.

Robert Corell, chairman of the ACIA, told the subcommittee: CO2 (carbon dioxide) is a major greenhouse gas with a resident time in the atmosphere in excess of 100 years. To reduce the effect, you have to act now. It will take 100 years simply to bring the atmosphere back to its natural variability.

While the hearing was going on, a report from the Competitive Enterprise Institute arrived in reporters' e-mail inboxes titled, Launching the Counter Offensive: A Sensible Sense of Congress Resolution on Climate Change.

The document offered the following as a summary of its conclusions:

Given the growing evidence that any anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming will likely be at the low-end (1.4 degrees Celsius or 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's projections, the weak and even fictional basis of climate disaster scenarios, the high cost and negligible benefit of mandatory carbon dioxide reductions, the manifest superiority of no-regrets approaches that make societies safer by making them wealthier, the high susceptibility of energy rationing schemes to special interest manipulation and political abuse, the abundantly documented ecological and nutritional benefits of CO2 aerial fertilization, and the vital importance of affordable energy to human flourishing, Kyoto-style regulation is not a responsible policy option.

McCain seems to grasp the weakness of these arguments: They are beginning to be overwhelmed by the data at almost every point. For example, there simply is no growing evidence that temperature changes will be on the low end of the IPCC projections.

To put it bluntly, the Marshall Institute has no scientific credibility and their statements always appear to be politically or ideologically motivated, Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, told UPI's Climate.

Wigley, one of the most cited authors in the field of climate science, said he knows of no such evidence that warming will be at the low end of the IPCC range. He acknowledged that some claims have been made about the high end of the range, but added these are equally specious.

At a presentation last week at NCAR of soon-to-be published research, Duke University paleoclimatologist Thomas Crowley said: Future warming is really big ... We're talking about temperatures at the end of the century on a tens-of-millions of years time scale.

Skeptic organizations such as Marshall and CEI usually cite the fallibility of climate models - complex computer simulations of the planet's even-more-complex climate system - as the weak point of climate-change science. This is what the CEI report refers to as the fictional basis of climate disaster scenarios.

These models incorporate natural variability - things like the impact of the sun, volcanoes and other factors scientists call forcings that affect long-term climate patterns - and then puzzle out how much human impacts, mostly the release of CO2 into the atmosphere from industrialization, explain the changes.

At the hearing, McCain also read a statement by William O'Keefe, the Marshall Institute's president: Although global temperatures have risen over the past century, science is not yet able to distinguish the effects of natural variability from those caused by human activities.

McCain then asked NASA physicist Drew Shindell if he agreed with that statement.

Science deals in probabilities, Shindell responded. He agreed that no one can be 100 percent certain, but natural variability cannot explain what we've seen in the last half of the 20th century. There is a 95 percent chance or better that the temperature increase in the latter half of the 20th century was more rapid than can be accounted for by any known natural variability.

Or, simply forget climate modeling and look at what already has happened in the atmosphere.

Greenhouse gases trap solar energy and are an important factor in warming the Earth, said Scott Borg, section head of the Antarctic Science Section for the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Va.

Research results on the (Lake) Vostok ice core (in Antarctica) demonstrate the strong coupling of greenhouse gas concentration with temperature though glacial-interglacial cycles over the last 420,000 years.

Measurements of atmospheric (CO2) concentration at the South Pole show that the present concentration of (CO2) is higher than at any time during the last 420,000 years and that it continues to increase. This is a clear indication of how humans are affecting our environment.

The CEI report's assertions about plant growth are not complete, either. It is true increasing CO2 levels do encourage plant growth, but only for a while.

CO2 goes up, and so does plant growth, but plants need more than C02 to grow, Mark Hunter, director of the Center for Biodiversity at the University of Georgia in Athens, told Climate earlier this year. They need all the nutrients in the soil.

That growth response will stop at some point, because they will run out of nitrogen or phosphorus in the soil.

Hunter said the definitive work in this area has been done by Peter Stiling, a biology professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Stiling conducted experiments outside in chambers at the Kennedy Space Center. He showed that every single herbivore species declined under a rising CO2 regime.

Their populations all go way down, Hunter said. This is right across the board. To me, that's the most compelling evidence. There is all this new green plant material, but it's like eating cardboard.

Corell said if the United States takes no action on climate, things will continue to get warmer and warmer, and the planet is going to change very substantially. If the world were to accept Tony Blair's approach to climate change (Britain has pledged to CO2 emissions by 60 percent by 2050) it would bring us below all the scenarios we now use.

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