Yesterday, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (Bush's top science policy advisor) said he “strongly agrees” with the IPCC reports and “supports its conclusions and it was an “unequivocal” fact that climate change is man-made and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activity are to blame.
The US chief scientist has told the BBC that climate change is now a fact.
Professor John Marburger, who advises President Bush, said it was more than 90% certain that greenhouse gas emissions from mankind are to blame.
The Earth may become "unliveable" without cuts in CO2 output, he said, but he labelled targets for curbing temperature rise as "arbitrary"....
....There may still be some members of the White House team who are not completely convinced about climate change - but it is clear that the science advisor to the President and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is not one of them.
In the starkest warning from the White House so far about the dangers ahead, Professor Marburger told the BBC that climate change was unequivocal, with mankind more than 90% likely to blame.
Despite disagreement on the details of climate science, he said: "I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be.
"And it's going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies."
...This is an explicit endorsement of the latest major review of climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6994760.stm
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If the question is settled.....
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There may not be unanimity, but there is broad consensus among scientists and government policy makers around the world that there are significant human contributions to global warming.
The debate should be how to respond in a way that is reasonable and supports both environmental and economical sustainability.