The argument now is not if, but "how big will global warming be"

[RedEarth]

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By and large," he said, "we are not now arguing about whether global warming is going to happen; the argument has turned to: How big is it going to be?"

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AP) Scientists are peering into the clouds near the top of the world, trying to solve a mystery and learn something new about global warming.

The mystery is the droplets of water in the clouds. With the North Pole just 685 miles away, they should be frozen, yet more of them are liquid than anyone expected. So the scientists working out of a converted blue cargo container are trying to determine whether the clouds are one of the causes _ or effects _ of Earth's warming atmosphere.

"Much to our surprise, we found that Arctic clouds have got lots of super-cooled liquid water in them. Liquid water has even been detected in clouds at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 F)," said Taneil Uttal, chief of the Clouds and Arctic Research Group at the Earth Systems Research Laboratory of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

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"All the carbon dioxide in the coal and oil was once in the air. The plants took it and it went into the oceans or into the ground _ and now we're taking it back out," says Schnell. "The cycle is the same today, only you're taking something that took 100,000 years and doing it in one hundred years," he said. "There's a point where animals can't change fast enough, there's a point where plants can't change fast enough, so they'll either compete it out or go extinct."



http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/27/ap/tech/mainD8LL5CDG0.shtml