Friday, February 09, 2007

Global Warming Report: Run For Your Lives

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new little report saying that we humans are likely causing global warming and sea levels will go up in the next century, followed by major droughts. Yes, global warming is real and its here, according to the scientists and government officials who wrote the report. Just don't tell the residents of New York’s Oswego County, who are receiving nearly 100 inches of snow.

With all the doom and gloom that the report says will happen to mankind in the next hundred years because man is warming up the planet, what you won’t hear from mainstream media are other scientists who say man has nothing to do with the Earth's growing temperatures. Sadly, these scientists are not receiving the objectivity of the media and were probably not invited to the little meeting where the IPCC report made its big announcement.

There are scientists and researchers who say that there are other causes for the Earth to warm up, such as more solar output, underwater volcanic activities or just the natural cycle of the planet. Here is a good example that didn’t get a lot of play:

“Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity,” says Habibullo Abdusamatov, head of the space research laboratory at the Russian St. Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory, in a Jan. 15, 2007 article by RIA Novosti.

And while the ice sheets are melting thanks to SUVs, allegedly, what was not highly reported back in July, 2006 was that the British Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A had a study that contradicts many global-warming beliefs by stating that Antarctic ice sheets are actually growing and gaining mass.

Why isn’t the mainstream media reporting these findings? How come they are not made as big a deal as when a glacier falls into the sea? Yes, we can scream media bias and maybe there is some truth to that. Another is that too many researchers are getting funding from big oil companies and this does hurt other scientists and researchers who aren’t getting support from Big Oil. Even if studies are funded by Exxon and have some very interesting results, even I wouldn’t use them. And really, you just can’t ask a good journalist to damage his or her credibility like that, even if the studies might be true.

Another problem is that most of these studies and news articles are posted by conservative Web sites, which not only hurts the image of the article but it just preaches to the choir. And just because articles that shatter the beliefs of major man-made global warming supporters are posted by conservatives does not mean that they are not true. Sadly, though, many don’t or won’t see it like that.

Many conservatives call global warming “junk science” for a lot of reasons. Maybe they are still burned up over the global cooling that scientists in the 1970s predicted would hit Earth in the 1990s, which would cause another ice age. Well, the 1990s came and went and Florida was not iced over. And while this new report predicts increasing sea levels and droughts in a mere hundred years from now, let’s try to keep in mind that even the weather man can’t get the 10-day forecast right.

Monday, February 05, 2007

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