In the remaining months, we should focus on achieving more robust international involvement in training of Iraqi soldiers, police officers, judges, teachers, and doctors - all key elements needed to end the sectarian and civil conflict and build Iraq's future.

The scientists who do climate research understand that much of the ever increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere since 1850 must be attributed to burning those fossil fuels to produce the energy that drives industrialization.

As a scientist, my attention became totally focused on global warming some 15 years ago by the elegant and powerful measurements of carbon dioxide trapped in ice cores taken as much as 2 miles deep from the great East Antarctica ice sheet.

Americans were told repeatedly by President Bush and Vice President Cheney that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. None were ever found.

As this body of knowledge has evolved, a much more critical job for researchers and scientists has evolved into explaining and educating policy makers and the public to the risks of global warming and the possible consequences of action or of no action.

The industrialization of China alone would increase by 90 percent the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere and would at least increase the atmospheric CO2 by at least another 100 parts per million.

Yet, if we accept the solution offered today by this bill to explore and develop for oil on the coastal plain of ANWR, it will be 5 years, at least, and probably closer to 8 before the first barrel of oil flows from that effort.