Well, the IPCC is planning to release a report today about global warming, which everyone is expecting to say that all the warming that we have seen recently is man-made. Certainly this is a fairly widespread opinion and there are some scientist that agree with this statement. My latest issue is the number of scientists who are being really ignored right now, who are about to be at the point of kicking and flailing their arms for anyone to hear or listen to them. People like MIT’s professor of climatology Richard Lindzen or John Christy, professor of climatology at University of Alabama. The list is long, including some very notable scholars and leaders in their fields, but I am rather stunned how ignored they have been, in place of radical politics.
Now, being raised a bit of a hippie myself, I am certainly for a change in consumerism and how we waste resources. If we can reduce emissions so that humans can breathe better, great. If we can recycle more and find ways to have renewable resources, I’m all for it. But to spend billions freaking out about a trend that may have nothing to do with man’s actual actions, that’s where I have issues. If I had a choice between more money for AIDS in Africa or reactionary measures to something that the scientific community can’t even agree on, I am going with AIDS (or poverty, or any other plethora of worldwide problems). So, while I’ll certainly agree that there is a warming trend, and there’s plenty of science toback that up, I am more skeptical about man’s implications in that trend. Here’s a short list, though certainly not thorough, of arguments people have had against the man-made global warming trend:
- The earth has been definitely warmer than it is today within the past 2000 years. In the medieval times, the average temperatures were higher than what we currently have. Even in 1937-1938, the Arctic recorded higher temperatures than what we are reporting now.
- The ice melting rate is less than what it has been. The rate at which the snowcaps are melting in the Arctic is half the rate than they were melting before Ford ever put a Model-T on the assembly line.
- Warming is not occuring everywhere. Take a place like Greenland, who has actually seen a rather steep rate of cooling at 2.2 degrees Celsius since 1987. It seems that even the researchers will focus on one area and not the other. Certainly the arctic is warming slowly, but at the same time, the antarctic has been cooling at a rate of .12 degree Celsius per decade.
- We’ve seen this all before. As I posted in a previous blog entry, Newsweek had a front-page article in the 70s about global cooling. They claimed that man was doing something to cause the earth to cool down and that if we didn’t do something, we’d enter a new ice age. Hmm… sounds familiar. They even saw the ice caps increase during this time, while automobiles were roaming the earth.
- Pacific Decadal Oscillation. PDO is a theory that the earth naturally always experiences temperature shifts every 30-40 years.
- This wonderful Atlanta winter. So, why should I complain? This winter has been beautiful!
I still haven’t seen Al Gore’s movie, and I definitely would be interested in catching it one day, but I get the strange suspicious that a lot of these facts are left out. Just a hunch. I’ll be waiting for a movie that has no agenda, but I find that very unlikely. Until then, sip up on your mojitos in the winter, and enjoy the natural cycles of the earth’s climate.
