Reuters sounds the global warming alarm bells:

MONTEREY, California (Reuters) — The record Atlantic hurricane season last year can be attributed to global warming, several top experts, including a leading U.S. government storm researcher, said on Monday.
“The hurricanes we are seeing are indeed a direct result of climate change and it’s no longer something we’ll see in the future, it’s happening now,” said Greg Holland, a division director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
Holland told a packed hall at the American Meteorological Society’s 27th Conference on Hurricanes and Tropical Meteorology that the wind and warmer water conditions that fuel storms that form in the Caribbean are “increasingly due to greenhouse gases. There seems to be no other conclusion you can logically draw.”
His conclusion will be debated throughout the week-long conference, as other researchers present opposing papers that say changing wind and temperature conditions in the tropics are due to natural events, not the accumulation of carbon dioxide emissions clouding the Earth.
Many of the experts gathered in the coastal city of Monterey, California, are federal employees. The Bush administration contends global warming is an unproven theory.

But does the Bush administration really contend that “global warming is an unproven theory?” Not if President Bush speaks for his administration:

First, we know the surface temperature of the earth is warming. It has risen by .6 degrees Celsius over the past 100 years. There was a warming trend from the 1890s to the 1940s. Cooling from the 1940s to the 1970s. And then sharply rising temperatures from the 1970s to today.
There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming. Greenhouse gases trap heat, and thus warm the earth because they prevent a significant proportion of infrared radiation from escaping into space. Concentration of greenhouse gases, especially CO2, have increased substantially since the beginning of the industrial revolution. And the National Academy of Sciences indicate that the increase is due in large part to human activity.
Yet, the Academy’s report tells us that we do not know how much effect natural fluctuations in climate may have had on warming. We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it.

So Reuters got it wrong. Bush does not contend that global warming is an unproven theory. What he doubts — what many doubt — is the extent to which warming is caused by humans, and the extent to which it constitutes a crisis.

But as this Reuters story demonstrates, if you repeat something enough times — i.e., Bush thinks warming is unproven — it doesn’t need to be true to be accepted as common knowledge. The alarmists who assert that global warming is a major threat have gotten away with the exact same thing.