Facts versus agendas

Thursday, April 30, 2009 | 2:09 a.m.

The Environmental Protection Agency this month declared that the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases emitted from automobiles, power plants and factories threaten “the health and welfare of current and future generations.”

Greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, where they trap heat radiating from Earth’s surface that would otherwise drift off into space.

This trapped heat has significantly increased over the past 50 years in keeping with increased man-made emissions. This increase is cited as a main reason for various climate changes now under way, including abnormal melting in the polar regions.

If not stemmed, scientists say climate change will lead to coastal flooding within decades and cause more hurricanes, drought, forest fires and other calamities.

Now that the EPA has officially declared that rapidly increasing greenhouse gases threaten our environment, it can draft regulations aimed at reducing the emissions that produce them.

It is possible that the EPA could have acted much sooner if not for the skepticism toward global warming that prevailed for many years.

One of the groups promoting that skepticism was the Global Climate Coalition, a group funded by businesses with a vested interest in unfettered emissions, such as the oil and coal industries and automakers.

The coalition, which disbanded in 2002, was active throughout the 1990s. It flooded reporters and lawmakers with viewpoints opposing the growing scientific findings that global warming was reaching a tipping point.

Its arguments clouded the issue for many years.

Interestingly, however, The New York Times has obtained an internal document written in 1995 by the coalition’s scientific and technical experts.

The newspaper last week published this excerpt: “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

None of the coalition’s outpouring of public information, however, contained such a sentiment. We hope that as the climate-change debate goes forward, it will be driven not by agendas, but by scientific facts.