Why I Don't Buy into Global Warming

So let's be clear on something; no one is denying that the earth's climate is changing. Climate scientists and meteorologists that I have read about seem to all agree that the planet is in flux. As Al Gore says, "the consensus" is that our climate really is changing (by the way...I had no idea that science worked on consensus...I thought it worked on evidence, but what do I know?)

Here is where consensus seems to stop.

Where I see a lack of consensus is on the issue of weather the climate change is anthropogenic, or, caused by human activity. That's the real issue, right? If climate change is normal, we probably wouldn't see much activity by politicians on it. The issue is weather or not we are casing it and, if so, what we need to do to stop it. After all, if we are doing something to destroy ourselves, its probably a good idea to try to stop it. But here is where the problem is; there seems to be no conclusive evidence that we actually are the ones causing it.

I'm not one to buy into hype and panic and, since I pride myself on my rational thinking ability and ability to apply reason in the face of challenging situations, I am a natural skeptic. Hysteria and political propaganda mean very little to me. I go by facts, science, proper interpretation of statistical information. Suffice it to say that I like to check things out and look at both sides of an issue.

What I see in my own reading and research is that there are a lot of climate scientists who think people burning fossil fuels have anything to do with our climate change. Apparently almost all of them seem to indicate that climate change is a constant. It sort of reminds me of the lyrics from RUSH's song Tom Sawyer : "He knows changes aren't permanent, but change is". It seems that our planet's climate has never been a constant and changes all the time. Who knew, huh? Oh wait...no...we all sort of knew it. After all, didn't most of learn that in the age of the dinosaurs the earth was much warmer than it is today? Didn't we learn that millions of years later the earth was in the grip of a global ice age? Haven't we noticed with our own eyes that we are not living in a hot dinosaur time or frozen woolly mammoth time any longer? Yes folks...we all know that the climate always shifts but when politicians, media and Hollywood (and let's face it...Hollywood and politics are often in bed together) start screaming "panic!!" we tend to throw our common sense out the window. So the scientific consensus is that the climate actually is supposed to change and will continue to change long after mankind is gone. It seems that, contrary to our own arrogant sense of self importance, we are either totally irrelevant when it comes to climate change or we are no more than one data point in the large equation of what contributes to climate change.

There also seems to be disagreement among scientists on the role of Carbon Dioxide, the proverbial smoking gun, of climate change. The Global Warming proponents would have us believe that the relationship between CO2 and Global Warming is a clear causal relationship, with increases in CO2 directly causing temperature increase. It turns out that there is no consensus on that fact either. In fact there are many of climate scientists that argue that the ride in CO2 is a result of warming not the cause. Go figure.

And, on that note, why do they always argue that warming is a bad thing? Isn't warm weather a good thing? Doesn't the melting of thousands of trillions of gallons of water from the ice caps, etc mean that there is more water available on earth? According to many climate scientists and geologists, if the ice caps were to melt, the world would not end up as scary as the watery planet envisioned in Kevin Costner's Waterworld (a film that is quite scary in its sheer badness). More than likely, the water would rise no more than a few inches. Sure some people would have to relocate but isn't greater water availability and more areas of warm, arable land for agriculture a good thing? If that's the result...why is that so bad. Frankly, I'm sure there are plenty of Innuit who would start heating their homes with burning tires if they could accelerate global warming.

But don't take my word for it, folks let's hear from some of the advocates of unpoliticized science:

Opposing view by the founder of the Weather Channel

Climatologists calling Global Warming a Hoax

UK Court blocks schools from airing Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth because scientists testify that the book contains 11 factual inaccuracies

Link to list of resources opposing the idea that there is a scientific consensus on global warming

My point folks, isn't that global warming is definitely not being caused by humans nor is my argument that we shouldn't reduce pollution and be responsible with our environment, after all, no one wants to live in a trash heap that smells. My point is simply that we need to use legitimate science as a basis for our policies and decisions, not half baked, politicicized pop-science. We need facts, not politics and facts are the realm of science. Trying legislate controls into the lives of people's lives so that they stop causing global warming is simply premature because there is no conclusive evidence that we are causing global warming.

I will leave you with this quote:
"Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus..." - Michael Crichton, A.B. Anthropology, M.D. Harvard