Climate agenda

Climate change is one of the top environmental issues, with liberals and conservatives evenly divided on whether recent global warming is more natural or man-made.

Environmentalism and climate change

The main contention of environmentalists like Al Gore is the argument that:

1. The earth's atmosphere warmed one or two degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 Centigrade) during the 20th century.
2. Most of this warming is man-made.
3. The warming is likely to continue and to be harmful to human, animal and plant life.
4. We must all work together to stop it by reducing emission of "greenhouse gases".

Science and climate change

Jack M. Hollander wrote:

... climate change remains a fascinating and important scientific subject. Climate dynamics and climate history are extraordinarily complex, and despite intensive study for decades, scientists are not yet able to explain satisfactorily such basic phenomena as extreme weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts), El Nino variations, historical climate cycles, and trends of atmospheric temperatures. The scientific uncertainties about all these matters are great, and not surprisingly, competent scientists disagree in their interpretations of what is and is not known. [1]

William Happer wrote:

The current debates about global climate change are complicated by our not understanding the physics of the sun or of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans well enough to dismiss them as major causes of climate change on the earth. Dramatic climate changes like the medieval warm period at the time of the Viking settlements of Iceland and Greenland from about a.d. 900 to 1250, and the subsequent “little ice age,” from about 1250 to 1700, which led to extinction of the Greenland settlements, were certainly not caused by manmade changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. [2]

See also:

• anthropogenic global warming

Links

• Global warming: both sides