What is Global Warming?
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Global Warming
Author: John Nilson
“With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes than he who enacts or pronounces decisions.” Abraham Lincoln.
People exist always only in combination with nature, they can not be separated from it by any means and thus any kind of changes either positive or negative are always reflected in our lives. Long time ago one of the main problems on the planet became the global climate change. The Artic ice starts to melt and disappear, Latin America and South America suffer from lethal storms and floods. Europeans have to face melting glaciers, forest fires and heat waves. The tree rings and ancient coral in ice cores show that the world has not been as warm before as it is now. The warmest years were all starting since 1998. Most of these changes are influenced by human activities, as people burn the nature’s stores of coal, oil and natural gas. As a result billions of tones of carbon dioxide come into the air annually. Some scientists even suppose that these changes were caused by the dawn of agriculture. The well known phenomenon connected with global warming is greenhouse effect. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that makes the obstacle for the Sun radiation in the troposphere, the lower atmosphere. Some researches also show that cosmic rays are also connected with this effect. As soon as the atmospheric CO2 rises the global temperatures are luckily to rise by around 2C to 5 C. As a result the ice starts to melt, changes in clouds and vegetation occur and so on. When the glaciers melt, they will certainly cause some rivers to overflow, while others will be emptied. The situations with water resources might cause conflicts in different regions. All this will of course influence the natural ecosystems, as not all species can move quickly enough to put up with the global warming, for example coral reefs. The melting ices will influence not only the level of rivers’ water, but also the level of the oceans is disturbed. And if the level of the ocean rises 6 meters higher, that would be enough to flood the lands of billions of people.
Forests and oceans on our planet were able to absorb about half of the CO2 people produced, but since 2001 the amount of CO2 is twice bigger, which really limits the resources of the nature.
Methane is the second most important gas for greenhouse effect. The effect of methane is even 20 times greater than carbon dioxide, but there is less methane in the atmosphere. Methane influences 25% of global warming. Methane is produced by cows and termites. Thus agriculture and rice growing can produce methane. Besides coal mining and oil wells also produce methane. The level of methane in the atmosphere is constantly increasing – this is also an alarming fact for the Earth climate.
Public Health organizations are also worried about global warming, as researches state that the global warming is luckily to increase human mortality, when the cases of diseases transmitted by mosquitoes and other parasites increase. But the American Council on Science and Health announced the conclusions of its study which show that such diseases could become serious problems for people disregarding global warming and that these diseases can be prevented not only by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of these conclusions was certainly to make the diseases for the government not associated with global warming. The findings of the American Council on Science and Health were as follows:
- As the World Health Organization states that there are more than 500 million cases of malaria each year, malaria can not be caused only by warming of the climate, the increasing of the temperature can increase the incidents of malaria only by 10-16%.
- The ACSH studies were also stating that wealth can bring health and stimulate long living, whereas poverty is one of the reasons for hard diseases and short life spans. And public health would be put at risk when great economic costs could go on control of greenhouse gas emissions, as it could lead to poverty.
- Yellow fever, malaria and other tropical diseases could be prevented with fewer costs than those needed to restrict greenhouse gas emissions, for example: use of vaccinations, judicious use of pesticides and biological control methods, usage of mosquito and fly screens and public education.
- Spending money for reducing greenhouse gas emissions means that this money can not be used for better methods of preventing the above mentioned diseases, as better nutrition and sanitation.
This was one of the bright examples how the problem of global warming is not treated in a proper way in order to solve the financial and other problems of the high politic leaders, who care really not much for the future of the whole planet.
But no matter what is said, global warming still stays a great problem of the whole mankind. Certainly it is not possible to stop all human activities that disturb the atmosphere as they are connected with producing food and making people warm. But we should not forget that some predictions about global warming are close to tragic. People are controlling the whole Earth as there are almost no places, which never felt the hand of a human. And thus the whole responsibility is on people. There are certain measures to at least avoid the worst case, the disaster on the planet. People can reduce of greenhouse gas emissions with the help of energy conservation, like turning the computers and other technical devices off, when they do not use them, use compact fluorescent lights, unplug the chargers of cell phones and digital cameras and so on.
The issues of global warming and fossil fuel usage are certainly closely connected. The use of oil and natural resources will decline in a decade. But this would not reduce the carbon dioxide emissions automatically, the replacements with coal, heavy oil and tar sand contain even more carbon, if to make them produce the same amount of energy they will produce twice more carbon. But the fact is that all transport, roads and airports for this transport are useless without oil. To create a new transport system is a task for the whole society, not for an individual, besides it would need money, time, natural resources and a lot of brain power. So the previous arguments concerning a lot of money spent on the stopping or at least slowing the global warming can be put aside against these ones.
The projections made for the future state that Earth will be an ice planet without greenhouse effect, the Earth will get warmer, by the 2100 the temperature will be 1.5 C – 4.5 C warmer, the increase will be less in the southern hemisphere and greater in the northern hemisphere. The global temperature is connected with carbon dioxide level and methane level, which at the moment exceed greatly the past levels.
It is necessary to mention some facts concerning the future in order to understand why the global warming can be considered a disaster for the whole planet. Certainly it is not possible to know the future climate on Earth precisely, but some data are certain: every century brings the increase of the temperature of 1-2C. It is enough for Greenland and Antarctica to start melting, thus some part of northern areas could become a farmland and Sahara might become bigger. Storms can be stronger. Some countries like Bangladesh and Netherlands are luckily to vanish because of the ocean level rise up to 5 meters.
The term “climate forcings” is often used though it is hard to give its precise definition. To define it simply – this is an event that influences global climate. At this point it is necessary to mention that the weather and climate are different things, the weather is described with the help of variations of dryness or wetness, cold and heat. They do not play a great role for the whole picture on the Earth, but climate can be influenced by forcings, like for example a volcanic eruption can cool the climate on the whole Earth. Such forcing is called a short term forcing. An example of long term forcing may be continental drift which within millions of years changes the path of ocean currents. To anthropogenic forcings belong fossil fuel burning and agriculture. Not all forcings of humans result in global warming, sulfur dioxide from coal burning produces aerosols and they result in cooling.
These were the main negative influences on the climate that cause the global warming. They are rather serious and need urgent steps taken by people in order to avoid the catastrophes in the world of nature, to which we by the way also belong.
So the climate of the Earth should be an international concern and not only of scientists and ordinary people, but also of those who hold power in their hand and are able to make the politics work not only for money, but also for the future of the whole mankind. Unfortunately, these are mostly beautiful words and promises when elections are in the future as soon as they are over the real situation changes. Not a single national leader has come out publicly and said that the recent spate of hurricanes was the result of global warming, this is a part of conventional wisdom of environmentalists that they should not frighten the public, but should focus their interest on technical solutions, like for example hybrid cars and so on.
Global warming is such a problem that it is necessary to deal with all its aspects, which includes the politics. When politicians formulate their policy they need inputs from many disciplines and from science as well. But unfortunately global warming has become an absolutely political issue and politicians do their best to influence even science.
In 1992 at the Earth Summit the decision to prevent such dangerous climate change was taken. The first step was the 1997 Kyoto protocol, which is supposed to come into force in 2005.
One of the reports of the U.N. Panel on Climate Changes warns that the U.S. and other wealthy countries should immediately cut their oil and gas consumption and agree to get at least a quarter of their electrical energy from renewable resources – solar and wind power; and that they should double their research spending on low-carbon energy by 2010.In 1997 the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 to make Clinton Administration not to send the Kyoto treaty to Capitol Hill for ratification. In his first term president Bush rejected Kyoto. Russia ratified it, but most believe that Putin was made to do that as British Prime Minister and other European Union officials threatened not to let him become a member of World Trade Organization, which could cost Russia billions of dollars each year. But the chief economic adviser of Putin – Andrei Illarionov shows his doubts as for the upholding commit to Kyoto, he says: “There is no evidence confirming a positive linking between the level of carbon dioxide and temperature change. The U.N. Panel’s so called scientific data are considerably distorted and in many cases falsified” (Can We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?, by James Hansen, 2003, pp.2-15). One of the main ideas of Ilarionov and others is to break the advanced economies of the U.S., Europe and Japan, by persuading the multi-national companies to move plants and jobs to developing countries in order not to comply with emissions restrictions. But the president of the American Policy Center in Washington – Tom DeWeese doesn’t agree that it makes sense, he states as the main concern and the prime target is the wealth of the United States it would not be wise to place factories in Third World countries, as the same amount of emissions would come out from jungles of South America instead of Chicago and in this case we are not talking about the protection of the environment any more. He is right in a way.
The main goal of the meeting in Kyoto was signing the amendment to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Rio Treaty) in order to require the signatory nations to take the necessary steps to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, as these gases cause an alarm situation with global temperatures. The costs of signing it for the U.S. could be really high, as the county could be made to reduce between 10 and 20 % of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020, that would cause reduction of gross domestic products by $260 billion annually, it is equal to $2.700 per household. Certainly it was hard to prove that such costs are justified. Besides as millions of American people could be put at risk, several important questions appeared. The first one was about the possible merits or drawbacks of global warming. The World Bank researches prove that about one-third of the whole population suffers from water shortages. By 2025 they say – around 40 % of the whole population could be living in countries without sufficient water supplies. The crops will also suffer from lack of water. Global warming leads to more condensation and more evaporation, thus producing more rains. So it could be in a way an answer to the problem about lack of water. The second positive point about global warming is possibility of agriculture in North America and Europe, the southern regions of Greenland were not covered with ice when between 10th and 12th centuries the temperature was 0.5 degrees warmer than today, and could be also cultivated. The evidence of this was found when: “scientists from the National Science Foundation sponsored Greenland Ice Sheet Project 2 extracted in an ice core from Greenland’s ice sheet that spanned more than 100.000 years of climate history. Samplings from the core suggest that a Little Ice Age began between 1400 and 1420, blanketing the Vikings’ farms in ice and forcing them to abandon their farms in search of more hospitable climates”.( Michael Crichton’s State of Fear: Climate Change in the Cineplex, by Amy Ridenour pp.1-5). Thus global warming could mean more agricultural productivity and more water resources.
The idea that great storms are connected with global warming is sometimes called a myth. Those who say so find little evidence to support this fact and also to support a conclusion that there is a connection between global warming and increasing number of such pests and mosquitoes that bring malaria, yellow fever and other diseases. The researches of George C. Marshal institute show that most severe storms are more associated with warm and cold weather, for example in the North Sea the storms occurred between 15th and 16th centuries after the onset of Little Ice Age. The United Health Organization writes that with the grow of international traveling and great number of migrations and refugees people have the chance to communicate more, and thus the diseases are spread more quickly, not just from one person to another, but also from one continent to another.
Another important question concerns the global warming itself. Depending on the time period we are discussing the planet is either warming or not. Our planet has experienced several periods of warming and cooling. In his article in 1994 Richard Kerr offered his point of view about this issue: “In order for a climate model to have credibility, it must first be able to reliably “predict” current climate. … Some “tune” their models by adjusting the strength of solar radiation; others by adjusting the transfer of energy between the ocean and the atmosphere to get just the desired results. The result is climate models that are largely worthless”. (When Science Meets Politics on Global Warming, by Roy W. Spencer, 1998 pp.1-4).
Another question concerns economical results of reducing of greenhouse gas emissions. The plan as to reduce them to their 1990 level by 2000 and with further reductions for 2010 and 2020. This would make the taxes for carbon dioxide raise up to $100 $200 pro metric ton. Then by 2010 this could cause about 500.000 – one million job loses in U.S. The situation in Australia would be even worse, as they have a strong mining sector. The economies of developing countries would also be sensitive to these reductions in carbon dioxide emissions. The emissions in Brazil grew by 20%, in India – by 28%, in Indonesia – by 40% between 1990 and 1995.Thus developing nations and oil exporters have fears concerning their economic futures. That is why developing nations were exempted from reduction mandate under the Berlin mandate.
So the main point of political leaders is that the high costs for reducing greenhouse gas emissions are not worth the climate benefits they could bring. There is a point of view that even if such steps are necessary for improving our climate, we should not hurry and should at first improve our knowledge about causes and consequences of global warming, we should develop technology that could reduce the greenhouse emissions per unit of output, increase the reflectivity of atmosphere. The supporters of this position state that there are a lot of other important economical, scientific and political issues that need to be solved and there is no reason to rush to conclusions about global warming, as scientists themselves are a kind of swept up in the moment. Even after the Kyoto was coming into force constant debates between climate skeptics and global warming “supporters” continued. For example when Kevin Trenberth, being a head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested that there was a connection between climate changes and wave of hurricanes, Christopher Landsea, hurricane expert at America’s national Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wrote in his public letter that: “because of Dr. Trenberth’s pronouncements. The IPCC process has been subverted and compromised, its neutrality lost” (When Science Meets Politics on Global Warming, by Roy W. Spencer, 1998 pp.1-4).
The concepts of “nature” and “environment” were reconstructed. Actually the human-made phenomenon – global warming- is somehow considered environmental. Some people believe that this framing is political, not just conceptual problem. When the term environment is used it means something that is “out there” and needs fixing, but in reality the problem can not be considered external, as it is within people and not out. And it was and will be the humans’ problem.
Overall, the warming of the Earth has become a serious problem concerning, scientists, citizens and of course policy-makers. It is certainly hard to give one-sided characteristics to all effects, results and reasons of the global warming described above, there are certainly possibilities that not all recent researches and conclusions of scientists are true to life 100%, and the statement that in several decades we will know much more about climate changing and global warming has also some rational points. But on the other hand it is hard to deny the fact that the human beings do influence the climate and the nature greatly. These issues touch every single person on the planet and the whole mankind. They should bother the policy making people as well. They have to care for the wealth of the country but to simply deny all the negative facts about global warming is hardly the best way out. But unfortunately it usually happens so that the politics are more interested in real facts concerning finance and industrial developments than in vague future of the whole planet. As the whole industrial process and thus the economy of almost any country depends on its usage of natural resources, the climate seems a low “price” for spoiling them. When they start to think about problems caused by climate change, they think first of all about refugees, loss of job places, food shortages because of bad development of agriculture and so on.
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About the Author
John Nilson is a senior writer at Custom Essays Writing Service. He is an experienced writer of custom essays and term papers and will be glad to share his experience with you.
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Why I’m Skeptical About Global Warming (and Why You Should Be Too!)
Author: Seth Forman
I live in a wonderful suburban community on Long Island. My three children attend the excellent public schools in our district. As the two oldest children have made their way through middle school, though, I’ve been bothered by the rather flimsy instruction they’ve received on the subject of “global warming.” Despite widespread divergence among scientists and reports of questionable scholarship in landmark global warming studies, my children (and, presumably, their classmates and millions of other young students) have been taught a standard, one-sided view of “global warming.” Both my 14 year-old daughter and 11 year-old son have been shown Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth in sixth grade, but have been given nothing to suggest that some of the information in the movie is either controversial or misleading. So I’ve decided to put together this bullet point compendium of information discussing the current status of the “global warming” debate.
The History
1. Global warming is when near surface and water temperatures on earth rise. Scientists believe there are many factors involved in the earth’s temperature changes, some of which are natural and have little or nothing to do with human activity (e.g. atmospheric processes like clouds and precipitation systems, the variability associated with phenomena like El Nino and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation). But an approximately 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in average temperatures over the last 100 years has put the focus of scientists and funding agencies on “greenhouse gases” (carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrous oxide, and methane), some of which are emitted by humans. These gases can trap heat and light from the sun in the earth’s atmosphere, which increases the temperature.
2. The claim that the earth is warming, that the warming is due to man’s emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), and that continued emissions will lead to catastrophe gained major media attention during the hearings of then-U.S. Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space in 1988. At those hearings Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen claimed with” 99 percent certainty” that temperatures were rising due to a human-influenced “greenhouse effect.”
3. The same year as the Gore hearings, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assess “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.” The IPCC prepared four reports and a Summary for Policymakers. The last report was completed in 2007. Together, the reports contained the following conclusions:
- Global warming is occurring. Global surface temperature increased between .32 and 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit during the 20th century.
- “Anthropogenic [man made] climate change will persist for many centuries.”
- The full range of projected temperature increase is between 2 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the 21stcentury.
- The increase in global temperatures are a result of human activities, primarily the burning of fossil fuels (Coal, oil, natural gas) for energy.
- Given current trends, temperature extremes, heat waves, and heavy precipitation events will continue to escalate in frequency; and the earth’s temperature and seas will continue to rise into the next millennium.
4. The IPCC’s Summary for Policymakers (first issued in 1999) featured a graph displaying an unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures that looked like a hockey stick lying on the floor with its blade pointed up. Prior centuries’ temperatures appear flat, with a severe spike in the 20th-century.
5. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, whose 2006 movie, An Inconvenient Truth, relied on the findings of the IPCC. Gore’s film won the 2007 Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Best Original Song.
6. The IPCC identified the burning of coal, oil and natural gas as the primary culprits in rising carbon emissions over the past 150 years, dating back to roughly the start of the industrial revolution. Policy proposals to reduce carbon dioxide emissions contained in such international efforts as the Kyoto protocols, the Copenhagen Climate Conference (2009), and in “cap and trade” schemes, massively restructure economic systems and expand government’s ability to regulate and control energy usage.
The Controversy
1. In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain (CRU). The CRU supplied many of the authors for the IPCC reports. The file was quickly authenticated and provided unambiguous evidence that the CRU and associated research scientists throughout the world engaged in the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, data manipulation, and collusion. This event has become known as “climategate.”
2. Climategate has mushroomed into a crisis affecting an entire scientific discipline. At the heart of this crisis is the “hockey stick” graph produced by Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a co-conspirator in the leaked emails. After being given data by another scientist showing a mid-to-late 20th century decline in temperatures, Mann responded in a September 22, 1999 email to the CRU, that it was a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of the data. The CRU’s director Phil Jones applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick,” which also included a “method” of flat lining the medieval “warming period.”
3. An independent study by a team of mathematicians was requested by the U.S. congress and headed by Dr. Edward J. Wegman. The Wegman study thoroughly discredited the Mann “hockey stick” research because of invalid use of statistical techniques and found that the conclusions by Mann could not be supported.
4. Along with the manipulated “hockey stick” graph, the British government concluded that the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit violated the nation’s freedom of information act by withholding information requested by other, presumably critical, scientists.
5. In 2010, Graham Cogley, a professor of geography and glaciers at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada, brought to the world’s attention the IPPC claim that warming will cause the Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. It turned out that that claim was based solely on a pamphlet published by the World Wildlife Federation, not on any objective data.
6. Similarly, the Times of London reported that a claim that warming could endanger “up to 40 percent” of the Amazon rainforest came from an anti-smoking activist and had no scientific basis.
7. In a report to the United Nations in 2010, more than 1,000 dissenting scientists challenged man-made global warming claims made by the IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. This 320-page Climate Depot Special Report was updated from 2007′s U.S. Senate Report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus.”
8. The InterAcademy Council, a consortium of national scientific academies, scolded the U.N.’s IPCC for downplaying uncertainties about global warming, failing to point out when its claims were based on weak evidence and misrepresenting some findings as peer-reviewed by scientists, when they weren’t.
9. An independent group of scientists called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, issued a report called Climate Change Reconsidered, which said the IPCC reports are “marred by errors and misstatements, ignores scientific data that were available but were inconsistent with the authors’ pre-conceived conclusions, and has already been contradicted in important parts by research published since May 2006.”
Scientific Data That Challenges the Global Warming Narrative
1. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance. Oceans are the primary contributors of CO2 in the atmosphere.
2. According to Larry Bell, a professor at the University of Houston and the author of Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax, the abnormally high temperatures experienced on earth in the last century has been going on for 15,000 to 18,000 years, a “life-friendly period known as an interglacial cycle, long before man-made inventions of agriculture, smokestacks, and SUVs.”
3. Prof. Bell explains that temperatures are probably about the same today as during a “Roman Warm Period” slightly more than 2,000 years ago, and much warmer than the “Dark Ages” that followed. They are cooler than the “Medieval Warm Period” about 1,000 years ago when “Eric the Red and his Icelandic Viking tribe settled on grasslands of Greenland’s southwestern coast, and much warmer than about 400 years ago when the Northern Hemisphere plunged into depths of a `Little Ice Age.’”
4. According to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics: climate change over geologic time is something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” Glacial episodes have occurred “at regular intervals of 100,000 years,” always “a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s.”
5. The past century witnessed two distinct warming periods, one occurred from 1900-1945, and another from 1975-1998. About half of that total warming occurred before the mid-1940s.
6. While CO2 levels have continued to rise, there hasn’t been statistically significant warming since 1998.
7. According to a startling admission by Professor Phil Jones of the infamous Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (a primary author of the IPCC “Summary for Policymakers”) there has been no significant warming since 1995.
8. Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on www.climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly over the past eight years or so.
9. Warmer weather typically precedes increases in CO2 levels, not the other way around. What rise in global temperature there has been started approximately 150 years ago, but CO2 emissions did not start to grow visibly before the 1940s. In other words, the warmer weather came before the increase in CO2 levels. This is because oceans are huge CO2 sinks, absorbing CO2 as they cool, and releasing CO2 as they warm up. (Prof. Larry Bell uses the analogy of a soda can to explain this phenomena. When you open a cold can of soda it retains CO2. If it is warm, it releases CO2 and sprays all over.) These temperature shifts are heavily influenced by entirely natural ocean cycle fluctuations that affect heat transfer patterns from the tropics.
10. Short- and long-term solar fluctuations have important influences too. Decadal and longer changes in sunspot activity impacting warming and cooling cloud cover patterns are now being recognized as an important factor in global temperatures.
11. The idea that the world’s glaciers are disappearing because of CO2, a primary claim made in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, defies credibility. Most glaciers in temperate climates are relics of the ice age and have been receding since that time. Nevertheless, a large number of glaciers are growing, none of which were shown in An Inconvenient Truth. Only a small percentage of glaciers have been studied for mass balance changes out of the 67,000 that have been inentoried.
12. A healthy skepticism of scientific theories that seem to require sweeping public policy reforms is warranted. One need not be a cynic to understand the incentives operating upon the scientific community and the media. Piles of grant money and recognition outside their sometimes narrow fields of specialization await the researcher who identifies a real crisis requiring their high level of expertise. For the media the attraction to news that is alarming and that may cause panic, or even hysteria, is obvious: it raises interest in the news and thus increases revenue. History shows several occasions in which scientists and the media seemed eager to speculate falsely about the earth’s future.
- An October 7, 1912 Los Angeles Times feature proclaimed the “Fifth Ice Age is on the Way: Human Race Will Have to Fight for Existence in Cold.”
- On August 9, 1923 the Chicago Tribune declared “Scientists Say Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.”
- A March 1, 1975 cover of Science News magazine depicted New York City being swallowed by a glacier. The New York Times followed with a headline story “Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing: A Major Cooling Widely Considered to be Inevitable.”
- In April 1974 Time magazine featured a cover story with the title “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age: 51 Things You Can Do To Make A Difference.”
- On April 28, 1975, Newsweek magazine published an article entitled “Scientists Predict Massive Global Cooling.” It featured the following statement: “The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it.”
13. Professor Bell and others have pointed out that humans tend to thrive in warmer climates. “A warming planet is not necessarily bad. It enables humans and countless other creatures to thrive that couldn’t otherwise survive. It provides long and fertile planting seasons on large expanses of unfrozen land essential to feed 8 billion to 9 billion people around the world.”
14. The costs associated with efforts to reduce man-made CO2 are enormous. Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, has studied the economics of climate change and estimates that the European Union’s 20 percent emissions-reduction target will cost around $250 billion a year. Yet the impact by 2100 on global temperatures is likely to be only 0.05 a degree Centigrade – almost too small to measure.
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/environment-articles/why-im-skeptical-about-global-warming-and-why-you-should-be-too-4245197.html
About the Author
Seth Forman is research associate professor of public policy at Stony Brook University and blogs at his web site www.mrformansplanet.com. He has just completed a forthcoming book on Barack Obama and race in America.
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