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Global Warming Looks Pretty Good from Here! Brian Farmer As anyone who has been paying attention to the mass media knows, global warming has become a huge issue. The perception that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions must be curtailed, in order to stop the global warming trend, has built up enormous momentum. Over the past two decades, it has been argued that global warming is disastrous, and the evidence suggesting that CO2 emissions causes global warming has gone like this: 1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.
This evidence was not absolutely conclusive (correlation is not necessarily causation, though it did look like a fit), but the prevailing thought was, "Why wait until we are absolutely certain, when we apparently need to act now?" As a result, the idea that CO2 emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb CO2 emissions. The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that CO2 emissions caused global warming. But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above began to fall away: a) Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric
CO2 increased. During the aforementioned cooling period, we were being warned that shorter growing seasons would lead to significant reductions in food supplies, causing mass starvation. Obviously, those climate forecasts didn't pan out. And when one remembers that plants take in CO2 and give off oxygen, one realizes that CO2 is not pollution; it's plant food! So, it could logically be argued that the Green Revolution, which made great strides in agricultural productivity, was at least partially supported by increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by CO2 emissions. The only current "evidence" for blaming CO2 emissions are scientific models. Historically, science has not progressed by models, which are all too often unreliable, but rather by repeatable observations. The cause of global warming is not just another political issue, subject to endless debate and distortions. The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it can be empirically proven to be true or false. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. It just physically is there and, after sufficient research and time, we will know what it is. In the meantime, such knee-jerk, self-destructive measures as the Kyoto protocol should be rejected.
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