SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

After Errors, Global Warming Gets a Cold Shoulder

from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)

A series of highly publicized errors in a landmark report about manmade global warming--and lingering controversy over hacked e-mails between climate scientists--is eroding public confidence in the research and could further stall efforts in Congress to pass climate legislation.

The errors--involving projections, citations of source materials, and geography--have been seized on by skeptics of the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is almost certainly the most significant cause of earth's rising temperature. Now, there are signs the critics are succeeding at raising doubts.

In recent weeks, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama officials filed challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's finding that manmade greenhouse gases threaten public health, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, introduced a bill to postpone for two years EPA rules stemming from that determination.