National Research Council Finds Global Warming at 400-Year High! The National Research Council, chartered by Congress to advise the government on science issues, released a report yesterday that finds that the Earth has been hotter in the last 25 years than during any other period where temperature has been measured. Although the report holds that the hottest year was 1998, while Al Gore states in his movie, Inconvenient Truth that the hottest year was 2005, the National Research Council report and Al Gore's movie agree more than differ.

Congress ordered the National Research Council to find out if widespread data on the amplitude of global warming in the late 1990s is sound. The National Research Council measured the amount of atoms in elements of coral bands that form yearly to determine what temperature the bands are exposed to in the water in which it is formed. The isotopic composition or the amount of atoms in the annual bands' elements reflect the water temperature and isotopic composition at the time of coral band formations. The National Research Council also measured the relevant abundance of insect and plant fossils in lakes and other bodies of water, found out how old these fossils were, then they used information regarding what temperature in which such insects or plants could have survived to determine the water's temperature at the time of the fossils' existence.

The National Research Council also backed the temperature spike by comparing the length of glaciers now to what they were hundreds of years ago. Al Gore shows before an after footage of ice melting off the Earth's highest mountains like Kiliminjara in Africa and the greater part of the Patagonia Glacier in Chile.

The National Research Council maintains that these and other proxies can only effectively determine temperature for 400 years; global surface temperatures before 1600 A.D. are harder to determine using typical paleoclimatic indicators such as proxies. Furthermore, instrument-read temperatures date back 150 years.  ¶ 2:28 PM