The Real Inconvenient Truth...

I was recently confronted by former Insense writer ice-t (who also happens to be the "Opinions" editor of our school newspaper, The Beacon) about doing an article to be published in The Beacon over the heated issue of global warming. It is slated to be featured side by side with an article of a more liberal persuasion in the forthcoming issue, but I find it worthwhile to post the piece here in the meantime. I will be sure to pass along my opposing colleague's work as well when the issue is actually released. Until then, enjoy my half of the special:

By now I’m sure that anybody who even remotely pays attention to the media is aware of Al Gore’s Oscar success with his recent documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Global warming seems to saturate political and scientific discussions everywhere, but is the theory that man is responsible for such climate changes scientifically sound? Is the earth really undergoing “global warming” as a result of human civilization’s increased industrialization?

While Al Gore and the environmentalist crowd in America are busy counting their political and monetary gains, a group of eminent scientists and climatologists are set to air a television special in the UK entitled The Great Global Warming Swindle. Proponents of global warming claim that increased atmospheric CO2 levels are responsible for the temperature increase, but Swindle’s director Martin Durkin argues, among other things, that temperature increase is actually responsible for increased CO2 levels. Studies of ice age temperatures show that increases in CO2 levels come, on average, 800 years after major increases in earth’s temperature.

No students here at Dallastown High School would remember this, but ask any teacher: the big scare of the sixties and seventies was global cooling. Between the 1940’s and the 1970’s, the average temperature of the earth actually decreased. Ironically enough, CO2 levels were consistently increasing. In 2003, NASA’s Global Hydrology and Climate Center released a graphic which shows the changes in the earth’s climates spanning back to 1979. While some areas are observed to have grown progressively warmer, other areas of the earth have actually grown cooler since 1979. Once again, however, CO2 levels were and are continuing to rise everywhere, meaning that temperature change should have uniformly risen all over the globe as well if that is the true cause for global warming.

So since some serious holes have now been punched in the classical interpretation of global warming as a result of man, what other theories exist to account for these undeniable changes in earth’s temperature? Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark claims in his book The Chilling Stars that cosmic rays cause clouds to form and thus block the sun’s most violent rays, reducing global temperature. Former New Scientist magazine editor Nigel Calder has recently released a book in which he argues that this theory is at the true core of the global warming controversy. He argues that since solar winds bat away many of the cosmic rays responsible for cloud cover, and since our sun is currently in the most active phase it has been in for a thousand years, this is the real reason behind the earth’s temperature increase. The change in climate is a direct result of a double knockout delivered by the natural life cycle of our sun: increased amounts of solar winds result in less cloud cover on earth, while at the same time the sun’s increased intensity means even more harmful rays penetrating the atmosphere. The undeniable result is an increase in global temperature.

What goes up must come down. The earth has undergone many temperature changes in its long history, and it is sure to undergo many more. It is the natural cycle of things. Leave it to man to think that he is powerful enough to be the cause of every single change in creation. While some may spend all of their time and effort trying to stop the earth’s temperature from rising another degree in the next one-hundred years, I think my focus is better placed elsewhere in a country where 1.6 million babies are annually slaughtered by abortion and where terrorist organizations can freely and illegally cross our borders.

Check back later to read the other side of this debate as carried out courtesy of The Beacon...

~Tribal