Public debate and scientific evidence on global warming's reality

Global Warming: All Hyped Up With Nowhere to Go

Flow of Information

What is global warming?

Those who believe it

Those who don't believe it

Global warming discussions have been circulating for the past few decades with increasing frequency. Forty years ago it was a hypothesis that was thrown into the ring for discussion and examined as a "what if" by scientists around the world. Thirty years ago scientists began to offer up shreds of evidence that they believed indicated it was occurring. Twenty years ago scientists began to sound alarm bells in the hopes of gaining support for research. Ten years ago they told the world it was in trouble if society did not heed the signs. Today, it is referred to constantly as politicians, scientists and concerned citizens scramble to make sense of what is and what isn't factual. There is a growing element of fear across the globe and as evidence mounts with regard to its existence, global warming has moved to the forefront of world concerns.

As Cold War tensions ease, there is a growing recognition among international leaders and policymakers that developing a timely, equitable, and effective strategy for abating global warming will be their next great diplomatic challenge (Udall, 1990)."

Global environmental changes are becoming the topic of debate around the world among politicians, scientists and dinner guests as evidence mounts with regard to the negative impact global warming will have on the world in the future.

On Capitol Hill, where six bills to abate global warming have been introduced, former Vice President Senator Al Gore has said, "The question is whether the world's political system can find a new equilibrium before the world's climate system loses its current one... The winds of change are approaching hurricane force (Udall, 1990)."

Experts in the field of climatology predict worldwide social and economic changes if the trend continues that they predict will raise the average earth temperature by three to six degrees over the next four decades.

One expert in the field summed it up when he said:

Such a radical shift in temperature is guaranteed to trigger economic and social upheaval on an unimaginable scale. Its ecological impacts -- ice caps melting, farm crops wilting, entire forests dying -- will be catastrophic. One fact not yet grasped by many is that the Earth's thermostat has no upper limit; the warming will continue, theoretically for centuries, unless and until humankind acts to stop it (Udall, 1990)."

For those who need the warning signs that immediate action must be taken the time has come for drastic and worldwide measures. For those who believe it is nothing more than a political ploy to gain political and financial support it is a farce. Somewhere in the middle lies the answer.

What it is Before one can decide whether or not to believe the information being released with regard to global warming, it is important that one have an indication of what the scientists are saying it is and how it will affect the world as they see it.

Global warming is a process by which the earth's overall temperature continues to rise. While it sounds simple in its term it is actually a complicated process that will cause the earth's overall temperatures to rise between three and six degrees by the year 2050(Udall, 1990).

To the average laymen this does not sound serious as it simply means instead of it being 80 degrees in July it will be 83 or 86 degrees but scientists warn that it is not as simple as it sounds.

According to recent data retrieved from various studies on the subject of global warming such a temperature change will cause oceans to move inland and eventually completely cover cities including New York, New Orleans and others that make their way along the coasts of America and other nations.

Scientists have continued to predict that other cities will become submerged around the world including Bangkok, most of the Netherlands and Egypt and completely erase entire nations that are off the coast of India (Udall, 1990).

A recent illustration in Scientific American showed what Florida might look like by the year 2200: the southern two hundred miles of the state, from Key West past Miami to West Palm Beach, would be submerged under the Atlantic Ocean. Like many of global warming's potential impacts, this one is difficult to credit and nearly impossible to fathom (Udall, 1990)."

Currently, scientists are warning that global warming is about to become a planetary emergency which will throw mankind into a crisis mode never before experienced.

One of the reasons that this crisis is coming according to those who believe the predictions is the fact that mankind has built its society on the use of fossil fuels including coal, oil and other natural elements including gases. The fuels are used through a burning process and that process has released significantly large quantities of something called "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere (Udall, 1990).

The most important gas with regard to the greenhouse affect is carbon dioxide (Udall, 1990).It is not a "pollutant" that can be "scrubbed," trapped, or otherwise eliminated, it is a fundamental byproduct of the combustion process (Udall, 1990). This means that global warming has been simmering for a long time (Udall, 1990). Until recently, though, it has been one of the hidden costs of progress (Udall, 1990,in one fashion or another, it will affect the lives of nearly everyone on the planet (Udall, 1990)."

In addition to the issues about the actual process of global warming, there have been many arguments about how to proceed to stop its progression.

There has been a flurry of scientific and diplomatic discussions aimed at reaching some informal agreement on how best to proceed (Udall, 1990). Under the auspices of the United Nations, multilateral working groups are attempting to resolve some of the uncertainties about the greenhouse effect and lay the groundwork for further initiatives (Udall, 1990). Meanwhile, diplomats have begun to brainstorm ways of crafting an abatement agreement that will enable the overarching interest of a stable climate to surmount each nation's tendency to act in its own selfish interest (Udall, 1990).

At a meeting at the Hague years ago, the leaders of seventeen countries, including France, Norway, Hungary, Japan, Kenya, West Germany, and the Netherlands, proposed to broaden the mandate of the United Nations Environmental Program (Udall, 1990), Transforming UNEP into something approaching an "Environmental Security Council" was a radical idea, said Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, "but any approach, less ambitious would not serve us (Udall, 1990)."

Heads of state began to take heed with regard to the threat of global warming during the early 1990's and from that point on the issue has been used for intense political debates (Udall, 1990).

For many years the most pressing ecological question for society was how much fuel does society have to burn, however, the question has now become how much can it burn without contributing unnecessary amounts to global warming (Udall, 1990).

Since the Earth's atmosphere is a commons, logic suggests that no country has an incentive to control its emissions, unless it has ironclad assurances that other countries will also control theirs (Udall, 1990). In recent months, many scientists and international leaders have called for a treaty, enforced with trade sanctions and a fossil fuel levy, or "climate protection tax (Udall, 1990)." It has been widely suggested that such a treaty might be modeled after the 1987 Montreal Protocol, signed by more than forty nations, to phase out the production of ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons (Udall, 1990).

But many aspects of the global warming phenomenon promise to make the drafting of a "Law of the Atmosphere" a torturous and perhaps ultimately futile exercise. Among the potential stumbling blocks (Udall, 1990):

There is no scientific consensus that global warming has yet begun. It may be another decade before scientists can detect a clear "signal" that the predicted warming is occurring (Udall, 1990).

The impacts of global warming will vary from place to place (Udall, 1990). For example, low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh have more to fear from a sea level rise than landlocked countries like Bolivia or Czechoslovakia (Udall, 1990). The U.S. Corn Belt may suffer recurring droughts, but Canada and the U.S.S.R. may experience a net gain in arable land (Udall, 1990)."

Many governments currently subsidize energy to make it cheap. Energy prices in the U.S.S.R., for example, remain pegged at 1928 levels; and in real terms, gasoline prices in the U.S. are now at a historic low (Udall, 1990). Abating global warming will require discouraging the usage of fossil fuels by making them more expensive. This will be unpopular (Udall, 1990).

With the exception of a few large countries like the U.S., China, and U.S.S.R., which together produce about fifty-two percent of global CO2 most nations are responsible for only a minuscule portion of total CO2 releases (Udall, 1990).

Global warming's worst impacts are remote in space and time. Most politicians and diplomats will not live to see the dramatic rise in temperatures now predicted (Udall, 1990)."

Monitoring and enforcing a [CO.sub.2] treaty would be very difficult, if not impossible.

Reductions in [CO.sub.2] emissions by rich countries could be negated by increased [CO.sub.2] emissions in fast-growing developing countries (Udall, 1990)."

One of the issues facing the global warming crisis is the debate about who is most responsible for its creation and who should be financially responsible for its curbing. According to recently gathered data Americans are causing a much larger percentage of the problem than less industrialized nation are causing. Americans are producing a larger percentage of the greenhouse gasses that are at the root of creating the global warming crisis (Udall, 1990).

Other nations that have been industrialized are also contributing to the problem however, when all is said and done the entire world will suffer the impact that global warming will cause.

For example, two hundred fifty million Americans produce about nine times more CO.sub.2 than the nearly one billion inhabitants of India (Udall, 1990). Prime Minister Gandhi has made it clear that India will not scale back its ambitious development plans to accommodate what he sees as an excessive life-style here (Udall, 1990).

Seventy-five percent of [CO.sub.2] emissions come from industrialized nations; they have caused the problem," says United Nations Environmental Program's Noel Brown (Udall, 1990). "Why should poor countries, which haven't shared the benefits of fossil fuel use, now be asked to share the burdens (Udall, 1990)?" In all likelihood, such disputes may torpedo attempts to negotiate a [CO.sub.2(Udall, 1990)] reduction treaty, unless that treaty links national security, economic, social, energy, and environmental concerns to create a win/win situation for all countries (Udall, 1990). The outlines of such a grand compromise are faintly visible: developed countries would slash their [CO.sub.2] emissions, forgive much of the Third World's $1.3 trillion debt burden, and increase foreign aid to speed the transmission of energy efficiency technologies to poorer nations (Udall, 1990). In exchange, those nations would agree to stabilize their populations and cease tropical deforestation, which is responsible for about twenty percent of the [CO.sub.2] problem (Udall, 1990)."

While experts agree the answer is to burn less fossil fuel and to be more efficient with what is being burned it is not a simple process to convince the residents of many nations to cut down on their fossil fuel consumption. The world at large has become very comfortable with its electricity use, its comforts and its perks and convincing mass millions of individuals to suffer a little to save a lot is not an easy task.

Currently, Americans are experiencing record high gasoline prices, and one of the solutions seems to be that if Americans would stop driving, even for a week or two, it would force the oil companies to reduce their prices and thereby bring the gas prices down. However, people continue to drive on a daily basis and a mass shut down does not appear possible. This is something that impacts their finances every single day, however they are willing to keep driving. Using this example it is easy to see that a mass reduction in fossil fuel consumption for the overall benefit of future generations will not be an easy sell to the American public or the societies of other industrialized nations (Udall, 1990).

A recent study by the World Resources Institute concluded that developed countries could halve fossil fuel usage by embracing new conservation and efficiency initiatives (Udall, 1990). The United States has a special responsibility in this regard: Americans are five percent of the world's population, but produce twenty-three percent of the world's [CO.sub.2]; on a per capita basis, this works out to a staggering eighteen tons of [CO.sub.2] annually (Udall, 1990). "If the United States doesn't take the lead to cut emissions, no other nation has the slightest incentive to reduce theirs," says Brooks Yeager, former Sierra Club Washington, D.C., representative (Udall, 1990)."

Another side of the responsibility issue is that of the nations that are newly industrialized and emitting more greenhouse gasses than necessary because of the use of outdated technology.

China recently decided to manufacture millions of refrigerators so that the common household could use them. However, the nation erected hundreds of manufacturing plants that were instructed to build units using old fashioned technology which means the units burn more fuel than is needed. This and other technological moves by China may place it in first place for burning of fossil fuel by 2025(Udall, 1990).

The Soviet economy is almost twice as energy intensive as ours, coal burning threatens to make much of Eastern Europe uninhabitable, and East Germans are the only people to produce more [CO.sub.2] per capita than Americans. These political, cultural, and economic realities underscore how difficult it will be to implement an international treaty to reduce global warming (Udall, 1990)."

One of the biggest issues with regard to global warming is the arguments about how accurate the data is with regard to its existence, cause and effect.

While politicians and scientists continue to line up on either side of the debate studies continue to prove then refute the scientific data about whether global warming is (1) caused by greenhouse gas emissions, (2) Causing the rise in temperature, and (3) going to create disastrous effects if not changed or stopped. The following chart is an example of how confusing the scientific data has become.

Global Warming Evidence http://www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm

Aside from computer calculations, two sorts of evidence have been advanced in support of the "global warming" hypothesis: temperature compilations and statements about global flooding and weather disruptions. Figure 12 shows the global temperature graph that has been compiled by National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA GISS).The urban heat island effect is only one of several surface effects that can confound compiled records of surface temperature. Figure 13 shows the size of this effect in, for example, the surface stations of California and the problems associated with objective sampling. The East Park station, considered the best situated rural station in the state has a trend since 1940 of minus 0.055 "C per decade.

The overall rise of about plus 0.5 "C during the 20th century is often cited in support of "global warming" (38). Since, however, 82% of the CO2 rise during the 20th century occurred after the rise in temperature (see figures 1 and 12), the CO2 increase cannot have caused the temperature increase. The 19th century rise was only 13 ppm (2).

By the above study the temperature rising on earth overall cannot be disputed however the impact that it has on CO2 production is disputed.

Further complicating the matter is a scientific report, commissioned by the United Nations on the topic and the report alleges global warming is not only a real threat but a process that has already started (Dewar, 1995).

The study involved scientists from more than 75 nations who contributed 2,500 climate experts from around the world.

The report indicates their belief that global warming has already begun. According to those scientists there are strong indicators that global warming is under way and the earth is already being negatively impacted by its force (Dewar, 1995).

These are the strongest statements that have ever been made" by scientists on the issue, said U.S. lead negotiator Robert Watson, associate director of the White House office of science and technology policy (Dewar, 1995). "For the first time, it's clear we humans are influencing our climate (Dewar, 1995).

This report, I hope, will move some of the skeptics who are on the fence to say, 'Maybe this really is real and we have to start to deal with it (Dewar, 1995). "

The report states that the earth is getting warmer faster than it has ever done in the past 10,000 years (Dewar, 1995).

The changes are caused by fossil fuel use according to the panel of scientists who put it together.

The report took seven years to compile.

A climate treaty was developed and signed by more than 80 nations because of the results of the study.

Part of that treaty includes nations promising to ask their manufacturing plants and other industries to reduce the emissions that they put into the atmosphere (Dewar, 1995).

The scientists that worked on the report predicted that by the year 2100 the earth's temperature will be between 6 and 8 degrees higher than it is now, which will double the average temperatures worldwide. According to the report this increase in temperature will create weather changes that are unpredictable. In addition scientists predict changes in the ocean, the landscape, the overall eco-system that will negatively impact society's ability to live and survive comfortably.

The warming trend won't stop unless the emissions of greenhouse gases are brought back to 1990 levels by the end of the next century, and "substantially below 1990 levels subsequently," the report concluded (Dewar, 1995).

What this suggests in my opinion is the importance of global, concerted action," Watson said (Dewar, 1995). "We have to recognize there are still some fairly important uncertainties, so we don't need drastic measures at this point (Dewar, 1995). We can start with more moderate measures.

As our knowledge gets better and we have a better understanding of the rate of warming, we can adjust (Dewar, 1995). We can add tougher measures if we need them, or subtract some measures if we don't need them. The one thing we can't do, in my opinion, is to do nothing (Dewar, 1995)."

Conclusion

The global warming crisis is beginning to reach panic levels at least in most of the industrialized nations of the world. For the past four or five decades scientists have been taking aim at industry pollution as well as the pollution caused by individual fossil fuel consumption and began to put together data about the impact it is causing.

While there is no denying the negative impact many of the world's pollutants have on society there is a deep rooted debated going on behind the scenes with regard to global warming and its impact on the future of the world.

Politicians are lining up on both sides o the debate and using it as a platform for their voting speeches, while scientists are quietly fighting out behind the scenes. Scientific data has proven that there is more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere than ever before because of modern society. According to scientific models this should make the overall earth temperature rise by a mathematically measurable standard. Refuting reports insist that the models own equations actually disprove the global warming standards because the temperatures are not increasing at the rate the data claims they should be rising. Several scientists including well-known Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer have come forth and disproved the global warming theory but allege politicians are keeping it alive. Lindzen also alleges the reason most scientists are not speaking out against the theory is because they are dependent on taxpayer dollars for research funding and if the politicians get angry with them they can slow roll any research funding efforts needed.

When all is said and done the actual facts are that there is an increase in carbon dioxide in the air and this does cause the green house gas affect the global warming theory believes that it does. However, the clouds will also increase as the temperatures begin to rise and those clouds are going to prevent the overall earth warming that the global warming theory warns society about. For the most part the global warming theory takes some fact, adds to it the political spin and becomes an alarming crisis that has no scientific bearing.