A convenient story.

The tale of global warming is a complicated one, and apparently an issue that has divided not only the scientific community, but the political one. As far as this latter group goes, global warming appears to be a convenient bandwagon on which to ride, as in the case of Al Gore and his Oscar-winning documentary. The bandwagon itself is not of great concern, but the ease of which people get on the bandwagon is, mostly because almost everyone who talks about global warming knows next to nothing about it, making for a battle worse than PC vs Mac, or XBox 360 vs PS3; global warming is a battle wherein each side recruits soldiers thanks to hearsay, rhetoric, and the paranoia Americans love to embrace.

The term “global warming” has been around for awhile, and though I first heard it about a decade ago, beyond the fact that it meant doom for the world thanks to irresponsible use of man-made aerosols and gas products, the science behind the phenomenon was not revealed to me. A little research into the subject revealed to me that the term itself is technically neutral in terms of causation, and only generally considered to target man-made, unnatural increases in temperature. Global warming, it turns out, is a necessary phenomenon, whereas the compounded effect of too many greenhouse gases could potentially danger the planet’s life.

While the theoretical dangers associated with man-made global warming may be of concern, they should not be focused on exclusively, for though they are contributors, they are not the sole culprit. Rather, any study of global warming and climate change needs to account for other factors, including solar variation, even though these factors vary in degree of influence depending on which scientist one talks to. What we do know (aside from the fact that the sun is hella-hot) is that specific natural events cannot be attributed to global warming, while the events in general can said to have been influenced by whatever climate change one chooses to acknowledge. Existing models, which don’t seem very accurate at their present state, predict temperature growth ranging from between 2.0 to 11.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the next hundred or so years, but as these models are refined and more research is done, we may find that these figures are off by a good deal.

With everything we know about greenhouse gases and historical climate change, we don’t seem to know enough, and even leading experts are changing their minds about the man-made contributions to global warming. Nonetheless, global warming, as depicted by the media on a daily basis, is still spoken of as fact, and treated accordingly. For now, the effects of man on recent climate change is a matter that our scientists still need to spend time researching, because the issue is not nearly as clear-cut as most would have us believe. If it’s not global warming, it’d be some other problem, and though there’s nothing wrong with being proactive, it’s another to jump to conclusions about how drastic an effect global warming will have on the near-future of our survival. Finally, some are speaking out about the alarmism, and pointing out that the Apocalypse may not yet be at hand, despite Gore’s predictions; tempering the absurd propaganda is just as important as tempering the ills we introduce into the atmosphere.

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