Difference between revisions of "Global warming"

Revision as of 07:38, March 10, 2007

Global warming is a phrase which commonly refers to a scientific theory and to political proposals that follow if the theory is accepted. The scientific theory is widely but not universally accepted within the scientific community. Conservatives who are opposed to the political proposals that flow from acceptance of the theory, are properly skeptical of the motivations of the theorists, and challenge the scientific validity of portions of the theory. The phrase really includes three separate theories.

1) The theory that we are currently in a period of rapid climate change consisting of increasing temperature, which, if it were to continue, would have important socio-economic consequences well within the next century.

2) The theory that this change is caused by increasing CO₂ gasses and a resulting "greenhouse" effect.

3) The theory that this change is caused by human activity, mostly industrial emissions of carbon-based "greenhouse gasses."

Therefore, the phrase has also come to apply to

4) The proposal that global warming can and should be reversed by taking large-scale international action to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Point #1 has become very widely accepted in the past few decades, even by conservatives who were once skeptical.

Points #2 and point #3 are more controversial, although widely accepted by scientists. Points #3 is the one most attacked by global warming skeptics.

Point #4 is what the political and international debate are about. Both climate change itself, and the very large-scale actions that are proposed to combat it, would have enormous economic effects with identifiable winners and losers, resulting in an intense debate. For example, since the industrialized nations emit most of the CO₂, if it were agreed that these emissions needed to be reduced sharply, the burden would fall much more heavily on these nations than on undeveloped nations.

Al Gore, Vice President under President Clinton from 1992 to 2000, is a high profile advocate of the full global warming theory. Promoters of this theory, including many prominent scientists, call for international treaties, like one proposed in Kyoto, Japan, to limit carbon emissions using a combination of conservation and technological innovation.

The theory is widely accepted within the scientific community because of the vast amount of conclusive evidence, though that is not to say there is unanimity..^[1][2] On February 2, 2007, an internatonal panel of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments issued a report concluding:

The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone."^[3]

It should be noted that these scientists are motivated by a need for grant money in their field of climatology. Therefore, their work can not be considered unbiased, though no more than any scientist in any other field .^[4].

There are some scientists among the critics of the theory that global warming is caused by human activity. As they have sought funding from the very industries that face regulation, thier bias is real and thier conclusions should be suspect. For example, Dr. Fred Singer observed that "CO₂ changes have lagged about 800 years behind the temperature changes. Global warming has produced more CO₂, rather than more CO₂ producing global warming."^[5] Though, it must be said, that no scientist denies that CO₂ has lagged behind temperature at certain times in Earth's history. They maintain this doesn't negate in any way CO₂ influence on temperature. It merely means it wasn't a first cause of temperature increase at particular times in Earth's distance history.."^[6]

References

1. ↑ Myths of Global Warming[1]
2. ↑ No Evidence for Global Warming[2]
3. ↑ Borenstein, Seth (2007), "Warming 'Likely' Man-Made, Unstoppable." Associated Press, as published by Forbes[3]
4. ↑ FOX News: "On Global Warming: Follow the Money Indeed!" Feb 12, 2007[4]
5. ↑ S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)
6. ↑ What the lag of CO₂ behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming [5]