Global Warming: How we’ve all been mislead.

Ask any one about global warming and they will tell you it exists, and that it is man made. People such as Al Gore want you to think that the world is getting hotter, the ice caps are melting, and you’re to blame because you drive an SUV. Well, this is where it is going to come as a shock to a lot of people. We don’t have as big an effect on the world getting warmer as we would all like to believe. In this paper I hope to provide some of the facts that are often left out when talking about global warming. Accordingly, after reading this paper I hope people become more subjective when listening to the arguments concerning global warming.

"It is a cold fact: Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenges we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. “Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976. Lowell Ponte wrote the book “The Cooling” (Ball). Just like now, where global warming is the consensus, in the 70’s it was global cooling. However global warming isn’t really a consensus at all. It in fact has many critics including 4000 scientist 63 of which are Nobel peace prize winners who signed the Heidelberg appeal, l10 climatologists who signed the Leipzig declaration in response to the Kyoto protocols, and the 19,000 American scientists who signed the Oregon petition also in response to the Kyoto protocols (Ball). With examples such as this you think would make people more subjective when dealing with such issues as global warming, but it doesn’t. People readily believe the scientific consensus on global warming as truth where that is very far from the truth.

The Global warming alarmists want you to accept something as fact, the world is getting warmer. I concur with this statement due to the fact, scientific data has shown that the world is getting warmer. Now ask yourself; “How much has it warmed and why has it?” According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which is in charge of determining the effects of human involvement on the environment, it has only increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. This is not as drastic a change as many people lead you to believe. During what is know as the little ice age around the 1650’s the global tempter suddenly dropped by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (Mandia). Furthermore, it should also be noted that the Earth has always had a fluctuating climate. Moreover, The Earth has continuously had ice ages and times of great warmth. The answer to the second question however, is a little bit trickier.

As previously mentioned, proponents for global warming such as Al Gore want you to believe that the green house gases you give off when driving your car is what is causing this so called “way of life” threatening temperature increase. Again I argue this is grossly exaggerated in several ways. Most importantly, many of the charts and graphs used to show how much green house gasses are given off by human sources often neglect water vapor. Water vapor is earth’s most significant green house gas accountable for about 95% of the green house effect, 99.999% of water vapor is from natural causes (Montie). So if you were to look at a graph or figure looking at the percent of green houses gas caused by humans that wasn’t taking into account water vapor “most do not”, human contribution would be exaggerate. Without Water Vapor humans are responsible for about 5.53% of green house gases in the air, when taking into account water vapor only .28% (Montie). Humans only have a marginal effect on how much Green Houses gases in the atmosphere including Co2.

To be more specific Co2 is the gas that is released when we drive are car. There is 368,400 parts per billion of Co2 in our atmosphere 11,880 of theses parts per billion are from human causes (Montie). That’s about 3 % we contribute, hardly anything in the grand scheme of things. However Co2 is considered to be the main culprit of man made global warming, even when there are other gases in the atmosphere such as methane that are 50 times more potent then Co2 (Montie). Professor Tim Patterson a paleoclimatologist from Carleton University stated before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development that: “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.” He then asked the committee "On the basis of this evidence, it seems inconceivable that anyone could still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" (Harris).

Sulfate aerosols are very thin, solid particles comprised of sulfuric acid that are suspended in the atmosphere (Charlson 48). What most people do not know is that when you burn fossil fuels they give off this substance, sulfate aerosol. Other natural accruing aerosols are fog and volcanic ash. The majority of the Sulfate aerosols in our atmosphere derive from oxidation of sulfur dioxide produced in the combustion of fossil fuels. These levels of fossil fuel produced sulfate aerosols have greatly increased in our atmosphere since the 1950’s. Sulfate aerosols cool the earth. They directly reflect solar radiation back into space, indirectly, by increasing the reflectivity of clouds (Sulfate Aerosols and global warming, Pathbreakers, 1996d). In short, while burning fossil fuel produce green house gases, the burning also producing sulfate aerosols which cool the earth.

Today, there is a lot of convincing evidence that discus the sun’s contribution to the warming of the past 100 years. Solar variation itself is the natural changes of radiation emitted by the sun and many scientists have considered that increased sunspots cause an increase in temperature here on earth. (Changing Sun, Changing Climate?, Theodore S. Feldman (PSDI, Bedford, Mass), august 2007). This idea also collaborates with the study done by Ilya Usoskin of the University of Oulu, Finland found that sunspots had been more frequent since the 1940s than in the previous 1150 years hence contributing to the slight temperature increase in the past 100 years.

Accordingly, though the global climate is getting warmer, the involvement of humans is very much exaggerated. There are many things that we need to take in to account, such as sulfate aerosols, solar variation, as well as an understanding of just how little of an effect Co2 truly has on our atmosphere. People should also remember that 30 years ago many believed the world was cooling. By noticeably understanding the clear differences between the two schools of thought, people will then be better suited to form a decisive opinion on this important issue.