The Heated Debate On Global Warming
“There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production– with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”
– Newsweek Magazine, April 28, 1975
Could this dismal statement be for global warming, the catastrophe that is supposedly striking us hard? Although that may seem the case, it’s not; it’s about global cooling. In the seventies scientists believed that Earth was heading towards another ice age. Now it’s just the opposite. What has happened to cause this wild swing of thought?
During the seventies there had been an outcry of global cooling. It was believed that was the case until finally the summer in 1988, which was unusually warm. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, testified before the Senate that after researching computer models he had figured out that due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world was getting warmer and would continue to get warmer if we didn’t do something about it.
This idea was all ready rather absurd. If you are assuming that the carbon dioxide is slowly accumulating on the ozone and that will change the climate, it will do it slowly and eventually, not in one summer.
Most scientists decided they didn’t want to be part of this, especially with all the media coverage going the other way. So they kept quiet.
In the meantime a group called the Union of Concerned Scientists stated that they believed in this global warming. Before this happened the UCS had voiced its opinion on many things including denouncing nuclear power. Many scientists, especially physicists, had always disagreed with these people before and had considered these scientists junk scientists. The UCS and other environmental groups led the crusade of global warming.
The UCS and others are saying that in the last past fifteen years there has been a dramatic increase in global mean temperature (0.2° F) and that it seems that this trend might be continuing. The evidence? The scientists point to the past record of our century where the global mean temperature has risen 0.5-1.0° F.
Global warming is supposedly caused by Earth’s greenhouse effect. According to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) sunlight hits the Earth and Earth absorbs it and then radiates it out to space as infrared rays. The atmosphere sometimes traps the heat and holds it. Our atmosphere is what keeps us safe from harmful radiation.
The UCS and others are now speculating that the gases in the sky will trap heat more, causing the atmosphere to become too protective, hold too much heat, and cause the Earth’s surface temperature to rise. When global warming happens these scientists predict there will be raised oceans, deserts dotting the land, frequent and catastrophic storms, and more.
The UCS and others are saying that we have brought this global warming on ourselves through a few things, deforestation and other methods to get rid of plant life, too much carbon dioxide that comes from factories that outnumber the trees, and other gases which we give off that hold a lot of heat that are in out atmosphere, for example, nitrogen.
But there are a lot of holes in what the UCS and other environmental groups say and to get the Earth heating up like they say they have to base it on some pretty large assumptions in their equations. They get their numbers from inaccurate computer models, such as the one James Hansen used in his research.
The computer models that exist now cannot properly sort out the types of atmospheric conditions or clouds, as there are too many uncertainties. Computers have a 50% accuracy of getting this right and often err, because what happens is so random. According to the NCPA (National Center for Policy Analysis) “When the [computer] models’ past and present estimates are compared to actual past and present temperature measurements, the models are way off by more than a degree.”
Yet this atmospheric and temperature information must be obtained somehow in order to come up with the real information of global warming, especially when more than 98% of greenhouse gases are water vapor. Since many of models are inaccurate, many of these important issues, like cloud cover and other atmospheric conditions, are considered arbitrary by the UCS and others.
That should not be the case; Earth would eventually heat up if there weren’t any clouds. If clouds are low enough they would have a cooling effect on the Earth. But then again they can play a dual role too and can actually add to the temperature depending on their exact position.
The UCS and others also neglect to mention the ocean. If the Earth were just land mass then it would heat up much quicker. But there are also oceans which have a huge heat capacity. They would have some serious impact and it would help the Earth stay cooler. Many of these models don’t take a serious account for the ocean and if the ocean is included then it is considered not as important as the land and it is swept to the side.
The carbon dioxide rates have also been exaggerated to make the Earth (with all these assumptions) heat up. The carbon dioxide rates that humans have given off in the past years have been calculated by inaccurate computer models and are much more than what actually is put out by us. Nevertheless these inaccurate figures are used and assumed to be doubled. They have to be so they can make a difference in the atmosphere since carbon dioxide right now makes up less than 2% of all the greenhouse gases.
This model neglects to mention that plant life uses up some of this carbon dioxide and turns it into oxygen.
Finally, with all these conditions, global warming might possibly happen. There are too many ifs to take this global warming seriously.
Members in the science community are coming out and saying that global warming is indeed false and based on too many assumptions to be relevant. Although they are still part of the minority, their voices are beginning to be heard and slowly logic is starting to overcome emotions, as science should always be.
Resources:
The first website is about Richard S. Lindzen and the second one is a paper he wrote up:
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen.htm
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html
For the information and the quote from Newsweek I looked at this article on this website:
http://www.globalclimate.org/Newsweek.htm
For the origin of global warming according to the NCPA (National Center of Policy Analysis) and more on the computer models:
http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba299.html
A site managed by the EPA which tells why global warming exists:
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html
For the petition the scientists signed agreeing that global warming is false:
http://www.sepp.org/pressrel/petition.html