Your account of the new report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) hardly informs the reader about the perils ahead (“Heating Up,” February 10, 2007). When you report that the IPCC’s range of predictions of the rise in the average temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8ºC in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4ºC in this report, you skip the essential background. According to Jim Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) for a quarter of a century, who has established a baseline for climate research popularized by Al Gore, the average temperature has fluctuated by only 6ºC over the last four cycles of about 100,000 years each. An increase of the same magnitude over a mere century spells no less than calamity. But the main reason for referring to the GISS baseline is that all predictions that would go above the average temperature of 15.5ºC also go off the charts. Given that we are at the average temperature of 14.6º today, a single degree change means that we have no scientific reference any longer. In short, we are already at sea.