October 20, 2006

Look Out: Curve Ahead

To the Editor:

The controversy over the "hockey stick" curve of global temperature change takes on a very different shape from a longer-term perspective ("Climate Science on Trial," The Chronicle, September 8).

In the 1950s, the first generation of population-control activists used similar curves to persuade world leaders to confront accelerating population growth. In the 1970s, the Club of Rome published a series of hockey-stick curves to make a potent political statement about