We have been conditioned with the belief that human activities are increasing the incidence of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which is the prime cause behind global warming and climate change.
We are also led to believe that science is predicting that the consequences of this will be catastrophic to the earth and threaten our very existence.
Most of what we read within the mainstream media today, and from the politicians, has the above assumptions subliminally embedded within the various narratives. Government policy towards carbon emissions and renewable energies reflects these beliefs, as hard caste scientific and moral truths.
The public are continually told that the vast majority of the world’s “scientists” are in general agreement about man-made global warming being the cause of climate change, and the potential damage it will do to the earth. However, the reality is that there may actually not be more than a couple of hundred people in the world who really understand the science of climate change, and are experienced and qualified enough to make a valid scientific opinion.
The public are confused more when evangelists from both sides of the debate put their views forward using statistics, information, and arguments that are convincing. Many of these stalwarts on both sides make a professional living through the speakers’ circuits, turning the global warming and climate change debate into an entertainment spectacle. What makes this even more sinister, is the vested interests some of these parties represent.
Climate change models are built upon limited sets of assumptions which make them far too simplistic for the task of making accurate predictions about global warming. There is no generally agreed theory that explains global warming and climate change in existence today.
No model can predict changes in temperature, and layout climate change scenarios with any degree of accuracy. However the earth has warmed up much less than what most global warming models had predicted.
The opinion of Nobel Prize winner James Lovelock, the creator of the GAIA hypothesis, reflects the above. He was quoted as saying…..”The problem is that we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included- because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.”
Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring also predicted that all the birds would be killed through the use of DDT during the 1950s and 60s – a prophecy that never happened.
Alarmism clouds scientific judgement and this is very much the case in the global warming and climate change debate.
Global warming and climate change cannot be considered a ‘settled science’, as it is portrayed today. The truths about the matter are still yet to be understood.
First it must be understood that global warming and climate change are not interchangeable terms. Global warming concerns the rise in average temperatures across the globe. Is this really occurring? And, how much is humanity actually responsible for this phenomenon?
These are very interesting scientific questions where there is a diverse range of scientific opinions today. We still require answers to tackle the second part of the equation, climate change.
We know that climate change is occurring on a continuous basis. We also know that climate change also changes habitats. How we tackle climate change, if in sense of the word, we can do nothing but adapt to climate change, depends upon answering questions about global warming.
However, climate change is not just an earthly phenomenon, it is an interplanetary one. Climate change may have more to do with solar energy, than with man-made CO2 emissions.
This is only an observation, but if this observation has some validity, then the whole ‘science of climate change’ is about to enter a new paradigm of explanation in the next few years by the scientific community, just as quantum replaced Newtonian physics concepts just on a century ago.
The evolution of science is not being factored into the global warming debate, and this is the biggest mistake being made at the moment by global warming proponents.
If humankind is not influencing global warming through greenhouse gas emissions, then the real issues at hand are completely different. The issue is not about abating global warming, but more about the changing habitats and environment humankind faces in the future.
The destruction of the forests, animal species left to go extinct, the creation and growth of unsustainable cities, water management and the pollution of the earth’s oceans, and the application of non-renewable energies, and not to forget poverty, migration, and population growth, are the real issues that must be engaged by humanity.
Humankind must learn how to adapt to a continually changing environment. This means both natural and human induced changes. This is where the real crises exist.
Climate change will destroy some societies on one hand, but nurture others on the other hand.
We have to learn to understand how the earth is a cradle for humankind. And then importantly, how we must exist within this cradle, in a coexisting manner.
Charles Darwin’s message was not about survival of the fittest, but one of co-existence. Darwin’s hinted the solution in the concluding paragraph of his The Origin of Species where he said…”It is interesting, a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborate forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”
Carbon emission controls and other political solutions will not solve any of our real problems.
We don’t really understand the science of climate change, and can’t even say for certain whether the world is going through a period of global warming, due to the multitude of factors and influences involved.
Over the last decade or so, the influence of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on global temperatures is just coming to light. The PDO is a cycle of different sea circulation patterns that changes over a 30 year period. A number of scientists believe that this PDO phenomenon is vital to our understanding of global warming and climate change, although we are still in our early years of understanding how the phenomenon really works. According to Dr Roy Spencer, the PDO phenomenon can be used to explain Artic ice melting over the last 30 years. The PDO phenomenon can also explain why Antarctic ice is actually increasing.
Some scientists are even claiming the world is heading into another ice age right at this moment.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) only exists within the earth’s atmosphere in trace amounts, at around 380ppm. It is an important nutrient for flora, a building block for all life on earth. CO2 being an invisible gas will not hold onto and trap heat within the earth’s atmosphere.
Water vapour is the most important greenhouse gas, which primarily evaporates from the oceans and is responsible for both reflecting and trapping heat within the atmosphere.
Carbon dioxide is not a poisonous gas, and higher concentrations are actually beneficial to plant life on this planet.
The global warming issue is full of opinions, as we don’t know the facts today.
We also live in the fallacy that humankind has the power to fix any global warming problem. This is in the light of the success the world had in limiting chlorofluorocarbons in refrigerants and aerosols, in eliminating the hole in the ozone layer back in the 1980s. This belief that we as humans can control the environment is arrogance in the extreme.
The proponents of global warming would have the world belief that it controls its own destiny in terms of being able to control the environment. Is this living in true reality?
When we connect morality with truth, inquisitions, purges, and clampdowns on the unbelievers usually occur. This is where the global warming evangelists can take us, back to the ‘dark ages’ of science and understanding, to where the earth was once flat.
Perhaps the last words of this article should be left to the Canadian limnologist David Schindler, who said “To a patient scientist, the unfolding greenhouse mystery is far more exciting than the plot of the best mystery novel. But it is slow reading, with new clues sometimes not appearing for several years. Impatience increases when one realizes that it is not the fate of some fictional character, but of our planet and species, which hangs in the balance as the great carbon mystery unfolds at a seemingly glacial pace.”
Prof. Murray Hunter
Given that 97% of climate scientists agree that climate warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position the question naturally arises in response to the above piece: who has the extreme doctrinaire obscurantist evangelical unscientific position? The 97% or the 3% of world scientists? Of course one may answer that the truth does not reside in numbers, but it does reside in scientific facts. So let’s us look at those facts as put forth by the NASA site. Most sane reasonable people would agree that NASA (which was able to get to the moon and back via science) is not a doctrinaire inquisitional medieval church. In fact, one begins to suspect that the whole argument above is politically and ideologically driven with purely economic considerations; a defense of a savage and biased and thoughtless capitalism which has indeed become a fanatical evangelical ideology to be held at any cost, and which if not rejected will end up destroying the human race. So, there is another opinion and it is highly scientific. Here are its facts as put forth by the NASA site. Readers can get the appropriate references and footnotes by visiting the site.
Scientific Consensus
The Earth’s climate has changed throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, with the abrupt end of the last ice age about 7,000 years ago marking the beginning of the modern climate era — and of human civilization. Most of these climate changes are attributed to very small variations in Earth’s orbit that change the amount of solar energy our planet receives.
Scientific evidence for warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
– Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years.
Earth-orbiting satellites and other technological advances have enabled scientists to see the big picture, collecting many different types of information about our planet and its climate on a global scale. This body of data, collected over many years, reveals the signals of a changing climate.
The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century.2 Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many instruments flown by NASA. There is no question that increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.3
The evidence for rapid climate change is compelling:
Sea level rise
Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.
Temperature rise:
All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880.5 Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years.
Even though the 2000s witnessed a solar output decline resulting in an unusually deep solar minimum in 2007-2009, surface temperatures continue to increase.7
Warming oceans
The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.
Shrinking ice sheets:
The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005.
Declining Arctic sea ice:
Both the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice has declined rapidly over the last several decades.
Glacial retreat
Glaciers are retreating almost everywhere around the world — including in the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, Alaska and Africa.1
Record high temperature events
The number of record high temperature events in the United States has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing, since 1950. The U.S. has also witnessed increasing numbers of intense rainfall events.
Ocean acidification:
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters has increased by about 30 percent.12,13 This increase is the result of humans emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans. The amount of carbon dioxide absorbed by the upper layer of the oceans is increasing by about 2 billion tons per year.
Decreased snow cover
Satellite observations reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has decreased over the past five decades and that the snow is melting earlier.