Assignment is to read both articles and summarize the main points of Essay

Assignment is to read both articles and summarize the main points of each - Essay Example This group of free market think tanks and contrarian scientists has ceaselessly worked towards creating a paralyzing thick fog of doubt around the issue of climate change. The group was seen to first claim that the earth was not warming and the current warming being experienced was natural and its effects would be harmless and minuscule. Newsweek polls showed that only 46 percent of Americans believe that the greenhouse effect is currently being felt today (Begley 22). Several states such as California, New Jersey and Minnesota has recently signed laws targeted at reducing their carbon emissions levels by up to 80% by the year 2050. In January 2007, nine different corporations including, Caterpillar and General Electric were seen to actively call on Congress to enact various strong national legislation that reduce the level of emissions attributed to greenhouse gases (Begley 22). On June 23rd, 1988, James Hansen who was a NASA climatologist presented a testimony before congress on how the greenhouse effect had been detected and was currently in the process of changing the planet’s climate. This testimony caused the world’s science community to work together in an attempt to resolve and better explain the issue of climate change. This move caused several industry associations and individual companies to form various lobby groups like the Information Council on the Environment (ICE) and the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) to try and cast doubt on the effects of climate change in a similar manner to how doubt had been cast on the effects of smoking (Begley 23). The United Nations organized a summit dubbed â€Å"Earth Summit† in 1992, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Both the ICE and the GCC lobbied against the recommendations made during the Earth Summit successfully managed to convince the American President Bush not to mandatory cut back into law. The Rio treaty had been seen to call on all countries to try and stabilize their greenhouse emissions by