Mounting evidence.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Doubts about global warming keep melting away like polar ice caps.

A flurry of new scientific studies provides new evidence that should make it harder for President Bush and skeptics in Congress to stop playing their dangerous game of denial.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the World Health Organization recently analyzed how humans have been adversely affected by regional and global change. They concluded that 150,000 people per year have died during the past three decades as a result of a steadily warming planet. The researchers estimated that 5 million cases of illness, in particular insect-borne illnesses such as malaria and West Nile, can be attributed to climate change.

At Princeton University, researchers concluded that rising sea levels could submerge up to 3 percent of New Jersey by the end of the century. Their report warned that warming could dramatically affect conditions along the Jersey Shore, resulting in 100-year floods every five years, tainted water supplies as far inland as Philadelphia and the elimination of dozens of animal species.

Meanwhile, a team of U.S. scientists warned this month that global warming will disrupt water supplies for an estimated 1.6 billion people worldwide. The study, led by a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, focused on the effects of rapidly shrinking snowpacks such as those in the Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountain ranges that provide water to more than half the world's population.

That's just a sampling of recent scientific findings on the effects of global warming. Despite such compelling evidence, the Bush administration and its supporters in Congress continue to insist there is no hard evidence of global warming - and that, even if such evidence exists, remedies would wreak havoc with the U.S. economy.

Across the country, businesses, local and state governments are taking action on global warming. In Oregon, Gov. Ted Kulongoski has ordered state officials to adopt California's tough emissions standards for motor vehicles.

But until the United States, the world's most industrialized nation and largest contributor to global warming, squarely confronts climate change at the national level - conditions will continue to worsen.