The view from January 2001

From the perspective of 2008, I think it's pretty interesting to read this January 26, 2001 Salon.com article, entitled "Overwhelming evidence of global warming".

Excerpts:

After this week's release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report on global warming -- the strongest scientific evidence ever linking climate change to man's activities -- environmentalists and scientists say the time has come for President Bush to come up with a policy to address this slow-moving ecological crisis.

The study predicts that the Earth's temperature could increase up to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. In fact, it says we just exited the warmest decade in the last 140 years.
...
The new report states emphatically that "most" of the warming, especially over the last 50 years, is attributable to human activity, and not to natural occurrences such as normal climate variations from one decade to another, changes in sunlight or volcanic activity, which can cool the atmosphere.
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"Remember Chicago?" [then-IPCC head] Watson asks, referring to the 1995 heatwave that killed over 500 people in that city. "I'm not saying that we expect 500 people to die, but it's that type of phenomenon."
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Ironically, some environmentalists believe the best hope for an international treaty lies in the new Bush administration. They say a slow changing of the guard gives them hope that this administration will be able to do what the previous one could not.