Global warming

Global warming is a theory accepted almost (but not entirely) within the scientific community, but widely debated outside it. The phrase is usually thought of as encompassing three concepts:

1) 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 change is caused by increasing CO₂ gasses and a resulting "greenhouse" effect.

3) This change is the result of human activity, and 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 #3 are debated in the political community. Both climate change itself, and actions that would be taken 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 despite a lack of any conclusive evidence, though that is not to say there is no evidence at all. 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."

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 .. Also, these scientists are mostly liberal athiests, untroubled by the hubris that man can destroy the Earth which God gave him.

There are some scientists among the critics of the theory that global warming is caused by human activity. 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." 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 wasnt a first cause of temperature increase at particular times in Earths distance history.."<ref>What the lag of CO₂ behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming [6]<ref>

Some people claim that Liberals would like to see the economy of America destroyed by forcing us to drive solar cars to work, and use geothermal energy to heat our homes. Global warming is merely a thinly-veiled liberal attempt to destroy capitalism, they claim. Others, on the other hand, rather than claim it's about destroying capitalism say that it's actually a money making scam on the part of investors who stand to reap significant profits if the economy switches to alternative energy sources. Such is the passion and paranoia surrounding this topic.

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