Is Global Warming Man-Made?

From an essay I submitted to my English teacher during spring semester. She had asked us to find two sources with differing opinions. The following isn’t necessarily a conclusive opinion of mine, but rather it strives to analyze two sides of one subject.

The Incredibly Inconvenient Global Dilemma

Two articles, two authors, two opinions, both are supported by mountains of evidence, websites, blogs, videos, and scores of believers, the singular topic is not a religious one, though it could easily be mistaken for one; yet the topic is something far more tangible, something much closer to home, it is global warming. Indeed it would seem that global warming is an issue that has finally transcended the radical, crazy scientist phase, and moved into the realm of popular culture and collective thought. It is a political force to be reckoned with, and the fundraising dream of thousands of scientists who feel that environmentalism has been a neglected science for years.

In my Jr. High and High School years we watched a news program frequently called Channel 1 News. This was a program who’s aim was to educate teenagers on current events. It was there that I was first introduced in depth to the concept of global warming, specifically that of man-made global warming caused by Co2 emissions. As a teenager the I felt the urgency of the message, the need to act now was present, but it seemed then as if nobody was. After all, they were talking about the entire planet. What difference could we possibly make?

Now fast forward to the year 2006; global warming has reached the national stage as it was thrust into our public consciousness by a movie with a familiar host, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”. Now the household terms such as ‘carbon footprint’, ‘carbon tax’, and ‘carbon credits’ are widely known and understood. Legislation has been introduced, the Kyoto treaty has been pushed, and the political storm is brewing to stop global warming.

At the time of the film’s release I was serving an LDS mission in the southern state of Texas. Even there, in the relatively isolated world of a missionary devoted with singularity of purpose and mind to the spreading of my religion, did I hear about it. Coupled with Hurricane Katrina, and the numerous natural disasters that had happened the year previous, the subject of the Book of Revelations and its correspondence to weather was a popular one amongst the people I spoke with. I was amazed to hear the name Al Gore associated with this new phenomenon, though I had known he had been purporting the issue of global warming for years. Here was a man who was literally destroyed by the political and judicial system, it was a name that I had never expected to hear on the national stage again.

The premise of global warming is a dreadful thought, something ripped out of a science fiction book. Ice caps and glaciers around the world are described as melting at alarming rates. This would eventually bring about the extinction of thousands of different species around the world as the ramifications are felt throughout the globe. Oceans will warm and rise, hurricanes will become more frequent and more fierce, tornados will rage, and patterns of rainfall will change. Deserts will become jungles, and jungles deserts, while cities are inundated and flooded by water resultant from the melting of the ice caps in the two polar extremities of the earth. All this because of the follies of man and our modern machinations that produce Co2. It certainly seemed ripped from the biblical pages of Revelations.

Shortly after the release of Al Gore’s movie, was an opinion editorial written by Kathrine Ellison of The New York Times in which she expresses her fear of global warming. She goes on to explain that “I feel like a schnook buying fluorescent light bulbs – as Environmental Defense recommends – when at last count, China, India and the United States were building a total of 850 new coal-fired power plants.”

She continues by explaining her firm belief that global warming is real, that it is a menace seldom addressed. She attacked various politicians as not doing enough to end the disaster, and calls for “radical realism” to bring about new measures and regulations to be signed into law. But most importantly, she cries out for a leader to lead us in the front on the global dilemma we have aptly termed global warming. The hysteria in her tone of voice makes one want to head to the bomb shelter, as she mentions her beloved children and her desire to protect them. It would seem the world was going to end very, very soon.

Another voice in this hurricane of political action, or rather inaction is Miles Ketchum of www.justiceonline.com. He tells us that Co2 (carbon dioxide) makes up less than one percent of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. He points out that a famous graph often used by many to support the connection of rising Co2 emissions with the rise in temperature, known as the “hockey stick plot” as it resembles a hockey stick curving upward like a sideways L. This graph tracks data on a millennial scale, but towards the end connects our last century with the millennia, he states: “Comparing a modest increase in carbon dioxide levels due to human activities with the Earth’s cyclic, natural variations that play out over many thousands of years is just absurd.”

Mr. Ketchum goes through the most common claims of global warming advocates and quietly counters them. He advocates research for renewable energy, as only good would result from that, but ridicules those “same environmentalists who advocate shutting down coal power plants today are the same who were against clean nuclear power only a few decades ago.”

Of the two, I am more inclined to agree with Mr. Ketchum. Though I must reiterate that it is my inclination only. At this present time, there simply isn’t enough evidence either way to determine if global warming is manmade, or even real for all parts of the world. The hottest year in the last century was 1998, since then there has been a cooling trend in the overall mean average world temperature. This could be a brief retreat of the effects of global warming, or it could be a full blown indication of global cooling.

As I researched this topic, I viewed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, and I did so skeptically. I had been viewing some anti global warming websites. However as I did so, I felt an overwhelming emotion come over me, one that evoked a fear for the future of our planet. Here I was a skeptic, and even I was sucked into the power of this film. I can only imagine how it affected millions who did not check the facts for themselves, sought out both sides, but instead chose to believe every word that Al Gore presented in what was essentially a glorified power point presentation. My own research after viewing the film showed that much of what Al Gore purported to be a reality was in fact at very worst, an exaggerated possibility.

The claim in the film that the earth’s oceans could raise twenty feet were the results of supercomputers crunching numbers and simulations for months trying to simulate the earth’s climate. Mr. Ketchum delightfully pointed out that our local weatherman is often incorrect in his prediction for the next day, let alone the next fifty years. The earth’s climate is too volatile, too easily influenced by events such as volcanoes, warming and cooling of oceans, and other natural disasters. How can we even hope or presume that our super computers could accurately portray the weather fifty years into the future?

The debate on global warming has been largely one sided for such a long time that the opposition is disregarded, and seldom quoted by the media. Instead global warming is accepted as the inscrutable truth, and those who don’t believe it are ignorant, or are shareholders of oil companies. Yet despite this fact, there is indeed a growing community of nonbelievers who reject the idea of manmade global warming. Among them is the President of the Global Federation of Scientists, A. Zichichi of Switzerland. He, along with ninety-nine other renowned and accredited scientists, climatologists, and other earth scientists submitted a letter to the UN Secretary General on December 13, 2007. This letter stated that there simply isn’t enough evidence to support the widely accepted consensus that man is the cause of global warming.

Though the debate about anthroprogenic global warming is only beginning to heat up, there is certainly no doubt about the money that is being spent on the efforts to increase awareness of the issue. Al Gore recently launched a $300 million television ad campaign across the United States to urge people to act now to stop global warming. That amount alone is atrocious, and though I am no expert on Mr. Gore’s money, nor his organization, I find it highly unlikely that he betted his whole nonprofit organization solely on those television ads. There is likely more money where that came from.

Additionally scientists and universities are benefiting from the craze as they seek funding for their various projects both from governmental and private organizations. It is a joke amongst those seeking funding to include the words “Global Warming Research” into their funding submissions, whether or not their experiments have anything to do with global warming.

Whether or not manmade global warming is real, I believe a very valuable opportunity may well be passed up. With gas prices being sky high with absolutely no promise or indication that they will ever come down again, the time to search for new sources of energy has come. It would not be a stretch for any scientist or engineer to request funding for alternative energy sources and describe it as a global warming project. The politician is also missing out on a great opportunity to propel himself into whatever office he desires with promises of new energy and its implementation.

A local talk show host, Doug Wright is often heard saying, “Where is the clarion call from the government to develop renewable sources of energy?” John F. Kennedy proclaimed that the nation would put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960’s. The nation was energized and excited as it moved forward, spent massive amounts of funds, created many new jobs, products, and new discoveries that we still benefit from to this day. Where is the bright politician that will harness the political behemoth that is the global warming movement for the development of renewable sources of energy?

Such an action could prevent the American people from falling into an ever deepening crevice of economic turmoil as once again, new jobs and industries are created, money is spent and flows through the economy, and new discoveries are made. At the very least it would remove the United State’s dependence upon foreign oil, and allow us to burst the shackles of our foreign masters.

At the very least, the age of the gas powered automobile will soon be coming to a close within the next decade as China and other developing nation’s satiate their thirst, creating less gasoline for consumption in the United States. If that certainly does not do it, then our own government may well act upon the will of the people and impose a carbon tax, making it even more expensive and therefore less popular an option to drive your own car to work every day.