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Global Warming: A Convenient Misconception??? Kate Susa The world is getting warmer…or so we are told. Every night on the news there seems to be a new statistic of how much or how fast the Earth is heating up. Glaciers are melting. Sea levels are rising. Tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados and flooding are becoming more frequent and more devastating. Today's environmental science headlines read like regular doomsday predictions; but, how much of the global warming scare is just hype? Search "global warming" on the Internet, and the first links that pop up are not from trusted scientific agencies, the National Weather Service, environmental research facilities or even the government. Instead, you are directed to the resource that we as Americans and citizens of the world have created for ourselves on Wikipedia. Scroll a little further down the list and it is likely that your search engine will suggest an urban legend website! The truth of the matter is, though Global Warming is happening, it is not happening like most Americans think it is; and it is fallacies and rumors that get posted on pages like Wikipedia that help to fuel the fires of misunderstanding.
When did things start to go awry? Well not to point fingers, but as we have become a more media dependent society let us start with the movie that got everyone's attention, Al Gore's: An Inconvenient Truth. Like all things, statistics and creative phrasing can flip even the simplest statement 180 degrees. This movie was no exception. Gore paired unrelated statistics to photographs creating evidence of global warming that never existed. The most poignant among critics was his description of the dying pine forests in Canada. Paired with statistics on rising temperatures and lessened snow pack, pictures of defoliated trees, and browning evergreens "proved" that global warming had a destructive effect on forested areas, when in reality the trees shown had suffered an insect infestation. He used similar tactics in proving that the glaciers were melting. Though his compared photos did prove that the glacier in the foreground had shrunk in size, he failed to mention the size of the glaciers in the background of the very same photographs was increasing.
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