A hockey stick wake-up

EVER SINCE scientists in 1998 and 1999 charted the planet's temperature trends over the last 1,000 years, the graph's ``hockey stick" line reflecting centuries of temperature stability and a sharp jag upward in recent years has been a controversial symbol of the global warming debate. On Thursday, a special panel of scientists and statisticians convened by the National Academy of Sciences largely confirmed the research behind the graphed data. Those in the energy industry, the Bush administration, and Congress who deny that heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions are changing the climate of the planet have one less excuse for doing so.

Determining temperatures hundreds of years before there were thermometers or written records of climate is no easy matter. The three scientists who did the original study relied on such evidence as tree growth rings, corals, ice cores, and cave deposits. Critics of the study said that data selection might have biased it. The chairman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma, has lambasted the study and called global warming ``a hoax." Another critic, the chairman of the House Energy Committee, Republican Joe Barton of Texas, took the unusual step of asking the three scientists, including one from the University of Massachusetts, to detail their public and private funding, data, and methods.

It was in this atmosphere that a more open-minded Republican congressman, Sherwood Boehlert of New York, asked for the National Academy review. The academy's panel questioned the study's conclusion that the 1990s was probably the warmest decade in 1,000 years but said an ``array of evidence" backed up the study's general findings.

Democrats in Congress are little better than Republicans at pushing for the reforms needed to bring greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, under control. The New Direction agenda for the mid-term election unveiled by House Democrats earlier this month calls for more investment in alternate energy sources but mentions neither of the measures that would directly curb greenhouse gases: tighter fuel efficiency standards for autos and a cap on the carbon dioxide emissions of electric-generating plants.

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books, NASA scientist James Hansen writes that if there is a continuation of business-as-usual in energy use ``the eventual effects on climate and life may be comparable to those at the time of the mass extinctions. Life will survive, but it will do so on a transformed planet." This week's confirmation of the hockey stick trend line for global warming should help mobilize policymakers to end business as usual.