Global warming: causes, effects, and mitigation strategies

Politics of Science - Global Warming

Perhaps the most confusing aspect of global warming is the simple word, "warming." Quite often, on an anecdotal level, people will complain about the dangers of global warming during freakishly warm winters or prohibitively hot summers, and forget about the phenomenon when it snows. Deniers of global warming use the more benign sounding phrase 'climate change' to underline their belief that escalating global temperatures are part of the earth's natural cycles and have little to do with human activity. However, the scientific definition of global warming does not involve yearly weather shifts, but reflects an overall pattern of warming of the earth as a whole: "Since the Industrial Revolution (around 1750), human activities have substantially added to the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels and biomass (living matter such as vegetation) has also resulted in emissions of aerosols that absorb and emit heat, and reflect light. The changes in the atmosphere have likely influenced temperature, precipitation, storms and sea level. However, these features of the climate also vary naturally, so determining what fraction of climate changes are due to natural variability vs. human activities is challenging" (Global Warming, EPA, 2009)

Although most scientists now believe that human activities such as industrialization, factory farming (because of the release of methane gasses into the atmosphere), and mechanized vehicle transport plays a role in global warming, the political controversies surrounding the issue have often had more to do with politics than science. Even using the phrase 'global warming' or 'climate change' becomes a kind of test of a politician's belief systems, although both phrases are incomplete descriptions of what is occurring in the atmosphere and on the earth.

Representatives of major industries that would be affected by more stringent emissions limits like the automobile industry, cattle farmers, and other political action groups have generally allied themselves with conservatives who deny the efficacy of actions against global warming, while liberals (including, most famously Al Gore) have come out in favor of the science regarding climate change. Driving a Prius is as much a 'statement' as it is a savings on gasoline. Greenpeace points out that "For example, ExxonMobil continues to fund the think tanks and organizations who are running a decades-long campaign denying the consensus of urgency from climate scientists and attacking policies to abate global warming...Exxon's Global Climate Science Communications Team (GCSCT) developed an action plan to inform the American public that science does not support the precipitous actions Kyoto [Protocol] would dictate, thereby providing a climate for the right policy decisions to be made" to help the corporation, not the earth (FAQ, Greenpeace, 2009).

But global warming advocates and skeptics have both fallen afoul of scientific facts. The author of an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore was forced to remove a slideshow from a presentation on global warming "after the Belgian research group that assembled the disaster data said he had misrepresented what was driving the upward trend. The group said a host of factors contributed to the trend with climate change possibly being one of them" (Revkin 2009). Conservative anti-global warming columnist George Will wrote a column that was attacked by the scientists whose research he used to prove the absence of climate change -- they said their data showed the area of the ice shrinking, not expanding, contrary to Will's statements in his column (Revkin 2009).

Reality tends to be more contradictory than slanted political platforms: "Some regions of Antarctica, particularly the peninsula that stretches toward South America, have warmed rapidly in recent years, contributing to the disintegration of ice shelves and accelerating the sliding of glaciers. But weather stations in other locations, including the one at the South Pole, have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models" (Chang 2009).