If you watch certain talk news shows you would think that global warming is just some tool used by Liberals to punish businesses and make Al Gore money. You would also be highly misinformed on a number of other issues just as if you watched any other biased news source, but I have never seen any group of people so aggressively against science as the political right. They attack evolution, the big bang, geology, and especially global warming. (This is not to say the left does not have it’s own troubles with science. The Huffington Post has some of the worst science of any otherwise credible news source)
Just saying that nearly every scientific body in the world supports the idea that global warming is occurring and has at least some manmade component doesn’t seem good enough for some people. They attack the organizations themselves, saying that they are willfully deceiving people or changing the data. Some unfortunate personal E-mails and a misplaced digit aside it is hard to find flaws in the reports from the IPCC. Even if the graphs and reports were flawed would that invalidate the numbers that those graphs are based on? Those numbers were collected and verified by a large number of researchers. The numbers show that the average temperature of the earth is rising.
Is there a lot of hyperbole about global warming out there? Yes. This still does not change the data, the temperature of the earth is on a steady rise on average and is peaking outside the normal variation range, the fact that this rise outside of the normal began at the same time that humans began widespread industrialization is by itself not an indication of human cause of global warming. However, knowing the ideas behind the greenhouse effect, that carbon and other gasses in the atmosphere create a blanket that light reflected back from the earth cannot get back through, thus increasing the temperature, does lead one to think that the correlation we see at the start of industrialization of the world and the rising temperatures is related.
I have heard people argue that much of global warming comes from methane from cows and not humans, but I actually see this as a human cause because cows have come to the point where they produce so much methane because of human intervention in their reproduction and there are so many more cows because we breed them. So the methane produced in this way should be attributed to humans since we are the root cause of the cows of today. There are certainly natural sources of global warming, increased atmospheric pressure from the release of any kind of gas into the atmosphere, methane from living things, and carbon from forest fires all contribute. Most of these have self regulatory procedures that they follow however and are counteracted at least mostly by other parts of the ecosystem (although not, as the misconception would suggest the rainforest.)
The claim that the earth is warming is hardly contentious at all, but it is not warming by much by our standards. What we have to remember is that it is the average temperatures which are going up by small margins. We may also see temperature lows falling to even new low numbers and aberrant weather patterns continuing.
So many people will make outrageous claims, trying to downplay the role of people in global warming. Some will mock the “global cooling” that was talked about decades ago. (Global cooling was, as far as I can tell, based off incomplete data and now that we have much better readings of the entire planets temperature we can see that the earth is actually warming). I have had people tell me that we are warming because of an increase in sunspots, which is completely untrue. They back this up by claiming that Pluto is also increasing in temperature, but I cannot find anything on an increasing temperature on Pluto, nor would it make any sense because readings in 2006 were the first to likely have any accuracy and actually put the planet at 10 degrees colder than we expect.
In the end the same measures that would be taken in reaction to global warming should be taken regardless because of their increased efficiency and renewable natures. Even if global warming were not a factor decreasing gas emissions from cars and factories can prevent respiratory trouble from those located nearby. Here is a study on asthma that shows a link between air pollution and asthma, since it is an actual study document it can be a little hard to read but here is the important bit:
“The relationship between increased frequency of asthmatic
attacks and air pollution noted in the present study is
consistent with the findings of other investigations. Girsch,
et al,5 report a three-fold greater incidence of emergency visits to a children's hospital in Philadelphia during days of high air pollution...”
So not just for global warming reasons things like increased mileage, low pollution energy production and manufacturing processes, and emission reduction and capturing processing can provide solutions to our problems.
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