EDIT
For the record, in his latest publications Hansen calculates that we have 10 years in which to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid major upheaval that could well occur within the lifetimes of today's kids. Hansen says that lately he is beginning to feel that a rise of any more than 1 degree Celsius (roughly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the average global temperature will mean we're on "a different planet."
That's why it's unsettling to read today that Britain's chief scientist, David King, has just told the BBC that he now calculates that the world is likely to suffer a rise of more than not 1 but 3 degrees Celsius. He apparently bases this estimate on the belief, like Lovelock's, that no international agreement on greenhouse gas emissions will be reached anywhere near soon enough.
As we've noted before on ABCNEWS.com, the word "alarmist" is defined in the dictionary as "alarming others needlessly." Regarding the few remaining voices in the United States press corps calling the claims of so many preeminent scientists alarmist, I continue, from time to time, to check out the facts and logic behind these journalists' claims and arguments, and, I am sorry to report, continue to find them without substance or even, in many cases, any clear logic.
Global warming is not a politics story (though greatly politicized); it is an event, and as such needs not so much a political sort of "balance" as a rigorous perspective — as did, for example, the sudden explosion of Mount St. Helens in 1980 or the tsunami in Indonesia, except that global warming is far bigger and more complex than these events. I could wish there were some other authorities we could listen to about this, other than the thousands of credible scientists in the United States and around the world who, after decades of skeptical examination and debate, now bring us alarming news.
EDIT
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/story?id=1843086&page=3