Global Warming: Apocalypse Or Myth?

No matter where you live, I’m sure you’ve been hearing the hype about global warming. Promoters are predicting a huge temperature increase over the next 50 years, one which could quite possible destroy the world as we know it. Many people treat this as a fact, not a theory. But, is global warming all it’s cracked up to be? There’s evidence on both sides, and I’m going to show you the myths and facts about this theory.

The main concept of global warming is that greenhouse gasses, such as CO2, act as a global blanket. Since CO2 retains heat to a greater extent than oxygen, it keeps a greater percentage of solar heart on the earth. One of the main arguments for this concept comes from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. In the film, Gore shows an overlapping chart comparing global temperatures to CO2 levels. There appears to be a perfect match. This proves that an increase in CO2 warms the earth. Right? If you zoom in on the chart, a different story is revealed. A temperature increase actually precedes a rise in CO2 levels. This means that as the earth heats up from some other cause, CO2 levels rise. So, this means that historical data can not tell us whether or not CO2 increases the temperature. However, since global CO2 levels have never been this high, we can’t say for certain that no temperature increase will occur.


Global Warming advocates often say that the earth is warmer than it was a century ago, and, if this trend continues, a global crisis is at hand. But, even during certain periods of the 20th century, the global temperature has actually decreased. This does not correlate with the constant increases in CO2 levels as the century moved along, implying that the temperature change is coming from another source. In fact, the burning of fossil fuels has little significance on even the global CO2 level. Only around 14% of CO2 levels is from burning fossil fuels, the rest are from natural processes. But, if fossil fuels don’t cause global warming, how come the earth has heated up over the past century?

It’s hard to find for certain what causes global warming, since it generally happens over a long time period. One theory though is that solar activity is the main influence in the global temperature. In the early 90’s, Danish scientist Friis-Christensen suggested that the changes in global temperatures can all be linked to solar activity, something humans can not influence, especially with CO2. Another explanation for the warming of the earth over the past 100 years is the fact that the earth’s temperature always returns to the mean. Around 300 years ago, the “little ice age” ended. This was a period of prolonged temperature cooling, though not quite to the degree of causing another ice age. Since that time period, the earth has been simply returning to the average global temperature. When analyzing the temperatures over the past few thousand years, one sees that the earth is actually cooler now than on average. So, this recent increase in temperature is nothing to worry about.

If Global Warming doesn’t exist, should we keep burning fossil fuels? Not necessarily. There are other energy sources which give us a cleaner environment and help make us energy independent. These are both important advantages to be considered. However, we should not panic and switch off fossil fuels too quickly, and destroy our economy. The switchover should be gradual, and the rate should be up to the markets to decide.

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by: environment Total views: 20 Word Count: 626 Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2008 Time: 5:53 AM 0 comments