Railing about global warming is all the rage these days. And we do mean “rage.”
There’s Al Gore on the silver screen, making his case that the world is aflame because we drive cars with internal combustion engines and cool, heat and light our homes with electricity generated by the burning of fossil fuels.
Next he’s over at Newsweek, insisting to Eleanor Clift that global warming is “a moral issue” and that “At some point, reality’”—no doubt Gore’s apocalyptic version of reality— “has its day.”
And then there’s Bill Maher, using the very high-tech medium of HBO and cable television to convey his very low-tech, primal fears about global warming.
The problem is that the science in many cases is either unclear or contradictory, which often allows people to assert the technology that supports their claims. So maybe it’s time once again to review what we know about global warming—and what we don’t:
- The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has circulated a petition signed by more than 17,000 scientists saying, “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate.” So much for the popular, but clearly wrong, argument that there’s a scientific consensus that man is causing global warming.
- Temperature records are unreliable. Some indicate a warming trend, others do not.
- Though there appears to be a general consensus that the earth has warmed slightly, satellite measurements, which show the earth cooled slightly over the last two decades of the last century, are more accurate than land-based measurements.
- The earth has been going through warming and cooling cycles for at least a million years.
- Scientists don’t believe that last year’s rash of hurricanes is a product of global warming.
- Ninety-eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions, those supposedly responsible for global warming, occur naturally. A mere 2 percent is man-made.
Unfortunately, environmental hot-heads like Gore have a platform to vent their anger. If they would just look at the science, they might cool off a little—which might help. Who knows, maybe the hot-heads are the real source of human-induced global warming.