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The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush administration yesterday for refusing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, siding with environmentalists in the court's first examination of the phenomenon of global warming. The court ruled 5 to 4 that the Environmental Protection Agency violated the Clean Air Act by improperly declining to regulate new-vehicle emissions standards to control the pollutants that scientists say contribute to global warming. "EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency "identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA's power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants," the opinion continued.

For the first time in nearly two decades of reviewing research on global warming, the main international group studying climate change has found that heat-trapping emissions from industry and other activities are already influencing weather patterns and ecology in ways both harmful and beneficial.

But the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the long-term outlook, should temperatures rise 3 to 5 more degrees fahrenheit, was mainly for damaging and costly effects, ranging from the likely extinction of perhaps a fourth of the world’s species to eventual inundation of coasts and islands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people.