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Moment of truth No sooner did James McCarthy s name turn up in an Associated Press story on the outlook for global warming than he started getting outraged emails from colleagues. All that McCarthy, a Harvard oceanographer who studies how climate change affects marine life, told the AP last week was that the worst stuff is not going to happen ... not that I think the projections aren t that accurate, but because we can t be that stupid. The overwhelming response, he said, was, What do you mean, we can t be that stupid? Just look around! On that very question could hinge the fate of much of life on Earth. Last week was bracketed by two events that could make 2007 a turning point in the effort to control global warming. On Monday, by a 54 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the power under the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles. This victory for environmentalists was quickly snatched away by President Bush, who announced the next day that his administration had no intention of doing anything of the sort. But the ruling set an important precedent for treating carbon dioxide as a threat to human welfare, and opens the way to regulating it by tightening fuel economy standards. On Friday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, marshaling the research of nearly 1,000 scientists from 74 countries, issued a long awaited report on climate change impacts, adaptation and vulnerability .The study found that global warming was already affecting the Earth s ecosystems; it predicted that continued climate change, in combination with other environmental stressors such as population increases and greater urbanization, would lead to more severe and widespread drought, greater coastal and riverine flooding, and increased risk of extinction for 20 to 30 percent of plant and animal species. Depending on how much temperature rises, food production in the temperate regions could actually increase, but would probably decline in much of the tropics. | 
