Denying Global Warming
Monday, 22 August 2011
Climate change. Global warming. Greenhouse effect. Carbon emissions. These are terms that we find a lot in our current world, when we hear about all sorts of campaigns to stop our Earth heating up. But are we really listening to these advertisements? Are we attempting to prevent climate change from occurring? Or are we actually making things worse? These are questions that I will be addressing in this blog post.I recently read an article online termed The Inconvenient Truth. Sounds familiar? This was the title of the famous slide show that was presented by Al Gore and his team of scientists, showing people how global warming had been affecting our world, and providing crucial statistics and evidence to prove this. It showed how temperatures have been rising drastically over the previous years, how sea levels have been raised to a very great height, how the amount of ice in the North and South poles have shrunk, and other statistics that made many people amazed yet disgusted at the behaviour of our human civilization that has been ruining the planet. Many started to take the initiative, launching programs such as Earth Hour, Green Day etc. And everyone agreed to do something about this problem, so that the world could come together as one and save itself.
But then others asked themselves one very important question: Is this true? Another journalist named Steve McIntrye read about this slide show and became extremely sceptical. Although McIntrye didn't know much about the complicated science of climate change, he was a software engineer and a long time Debian developer. Thus, he had a huge passion for numbers and had quite an experience in the minerals business. He saw how Al Gore used the same tactics as those people in the minerals business who had tried to trick him before, especially a graph known as the 'hockey stick'. He thus started to launch movement that heavily denied the global warming claim. This movement was formed of people called the "deniers". McIntrye asserted that the data he obtained from Michael Mann, the head of Penn State's Earth System Science Centre, did not support Al Gore's conclusions, and that a true graph of temperatures would actually reveal a cynical sense of recent warming. A cottage industry of amateur climatologists have followed in his footsteps, doing intensive research into the subject, obtaining statistics and trying to disprove Al Gore's theory by demanding information from Al Gore's team of scientists.
The scientists from Al Gore's team have resisted the efforts very fiercely. The case has been fought out in blogs, the Halls of Congress and in deliberations of the IPCC. There have even been cases of e-mails stolen by a side of the battle, resulting in raised questions about scientific objectivity.
To me, I feel that we should be co-operating, not fighting among ourselves, if we want to save our Earth. What's the point of all this battling and arguing? The 'deniers' are particularly at fault. Why can't they simply accept the fact that global warming is affecting us and work with others to find ways to stop this? Why must they insist that the whole procedure is redundant and useless? They are wasting time and resources when they do so. They could even be afraid and cowardly, just unwilling to accept the so-called 'inconvenient truth'. They thus come up with ways to prove that this truth is, well, not the truth and assume that by doing so, they can sit back and watch the world suffer, claiming that it is 'a cynical sense of recent warming'. Is this going to help save our world? My answer is no. We should instead work together, producing a clean and green environment for our world.