The National Research Council has just decided “with a high level of confidence” that the Earth is warmer now than it has been in the past 400 years.

The panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is running a fever and that “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.” Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree F during the 20th century.

Much of this evidence relies on the hockey stick theory, which is fairly controversial. The hockey stick theory is basically the idea that temperatures and CO2 levels are stable throughout the past thousand years and spike upward very rapidly in very recent past. This theory is very controversial because when it was initially released, some of the math that the theory relied on was faulty. Recently, new tests and additional evidence have corrected the theory, and although the results are slightly different, they still hold that temperature and CO2 levels are going off the charts in recent years.

Point of the story is: the evidence keeps accumulating. How much new evidence will it take until everyone can agree we need to do something about it?

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