NEW YORK — Earlier this month there was held, in a midtown hotel, an International Conference on Climate Change. Yet another one? you might ask. But, no, this one was to make the case that Al Gore, with his argument in "An Inconvenient Truth" is a fraud, a swindler. One of the conferees' premises was "a 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries," which found 86 percent agreed that global warming was happening, "but only 56 percent said it's mostly the result of human causes."

In the continuing climate debate, citing a survey five years old strikes me as misguided. Lately, even the stubbornly anti-environmental U.S. government has been relenting a bit, though perhaps in the vain hope of sweetening President George W. Bush's "legacy." Also, to a nonexpert, the "causes" on which more than half the scientists surveyed agree seem to demand serious attention simply because those very causes are at the heart of the debate.

The conference was followed, in any event, by a news report on more recent papers that predict that the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission cuts of 50 to 80 percent by the mid-21st century proposed by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are not nearly enough.