Why I Hate The Global Warming Debate

I am not a republican, I am not in favor of pollution, I am not a christian, I do not believe in any supernatural phenomenon, I am not on the payroll of any international corporation, I am not especially fond of the activities of many large businesses, and I am vehemently opposed to mixing government and business matters.

Furthermore I have always been interested and a student of various sciences at least since I was about 8 years old. While I do not claim to be an expert on any of them I very strongly believe in the scientific method, in the importance of science to further our knowledge and understanding of the universe, and I try to keep up to date on what is going on in the science world. I love reading science magazines (SEED is my current favorite). I have also always been a math geek so I also occasionally find myself exploring issues in theoretical math, and following the stories of newly solved problems/conjectures with interest.

I say all this because those who are now termed "global warming skeptics," people such as myself are almost always characterized as ignorant, conservative, part of some industry lobby, paid off by some large company, Christian, mysticist, and or irrational.

I consider myself to be a very scientifically-minded person. I am that guy (okay girl in my case) who likes to point out to people that string theory is not really a "theory" in the scientific sense, and explains to my co-workers and friends the newest developments in gene therapy. I was the one in high school fervently defending evolution, and on occasion the big bang theory. I even spent some time in college debunking some of the more spurious internet sites claiming firm proof against evolution.

I say all this because at one time I believed in anthropogenic global warming. I took at face value the idea that what we were being told was being supported by scientists, and was clearly the truth. This was when I was approximately in middle school. When I got to high school I started noticing a bit of inconsistency in the whole issue. That is when I began to question. I did not doubt it as of yet I just began to point out to people certain obvious flaws in the argumentation we were being presented.

Now I am not talking about flaws in the straight scientific reasoning. What we encounter at school was many steps removed from scientific reasoning. We were subjected to long assemblies, videos, slide shows, articles, reading material etc. that were usually dooms day scenarios promoting some activity that sounded fairly benign like recycling.

What I noticed was that some of the material was trying to scare us on the basis that if nothing was done we would end up with a world-wide desert planet, a very hot desert planet. Some of the presentations told us we would end up with hot jungle planet, some said the global warming would initiate the return of the ice age giving us ice planet, and finally of course there was water world. While water world was the least likely scenario this is the one we encountered most often, because back in the early 90's for some mysterious reason people actually believed that the likely result of global warming would be water covering everything but the highest mountain ranges.

So this is what I began pointing out to people: Have you noticed that if the climate gets warmer in the future it will be attributed to global warming (in this context I do mean anthropogenic global warming). If it gets cooler it will be attributed to global warming. If it gets rainier it will be attributed to global warming. If it gets drier it will be attributed to global warming. Or to put it simply if our climate changes in the slightest in the next century that change will be considered proof of human-caused global warming regardless of what that change is.

When I got to college my I started framing my concerns in a much more scientific way: If our planet is considered to have a dynamic climate, that is it is not considered static or it is normal for changes to occur over time, and any change in the future will be considered to be a result of human-caused global warming how could this "theory" possibly be considered falsifiable.

This is important in science. If a hypothesis is not falsifiable it cannot be proven wrong (nor right) and is considered to be a non-scientific concept. For example all psychic and supernatural phenomenon is considered to be non-falsifiable.

Now I am not arguing that the actual scientific evidence out there supporting global warming is non-falsifiable. I am still at the point of relaying what was mainly laymen argumentation and debates. Basically the kind of thing you encounter in mainstream media and around college campuses.

This issue made me start investigating the issue more, and focusing on actual scientific magazines. I was told by a British graduate student who was convinced that the U.S. was going to cause the UK to be under an ice sheet by 2050 due to our carbon emissions that scientific American had definitively proved global warming in a recent article.

I found this article at the library, I found other SA articles about global warming online, and I could not find one at that time that definitively "proved" global warming. I was only looking back within the span of about 5 years so its likely I did not go back far enough, however even the article he referenced was actually about potential effects of global warming.

All the ones I could find were about the effects of global warming. All of these articles presumed that anthropogenic global warming was not only true, but went so far as to state that there was a well established consensus on the matter. Usually they did so by starting the article with "In this day and age few scientists would disagree that anthropogenic global warming is a big problem..."

My initial investigation spread out to other magazines, and other media sources. I searched for articles on the internet, I checked out many articles in Discover, I watched many documentaries, both of the scientific and not-so-scientific variety on the topic, and I even perused a few scientific journals I was able to get access to at school.

What did I discover? First of all the documentaries and articles that were skeptical never had trouble finding and presenting respectable scientists who were experts in the field they were commenting on, who disputed the current "evidence" and interpretation of said evidence on global warming. Now I have no doubt that these scientists are likely a minority given the current atmosphere surrounding the issue (no pun intended), but they are not quacks, nor industry hacks, nor republican lackeys. Credible dissent exists, and those credible dissenters all believed that there were many more dissenters out there who were afraid to speak up because of how badly dissenters got defamed (as hack, quacks, and lackeys)(also dissenters tend to lose their research grants or are not likely to be given them in the first place).

I also found that about 90 percent (obviously I am making an estimate here) of the material I encountered supporting global warming had obvious, glaring errors in it. The reason I say 90 percent rather than 100 is because I do not pretend to have the capacity to adequately determine whether certain data figures in articles in certain journals were accurate or not. I just know I always encountered written results that in my brain did not always match what the rest of the article seemed to be saying.

My point is just that I encounter this so often it is almost a running joke with me. I am honestly not looking at this material with an eye for mistakes. The mistakes are much more obvious in media productions that did not arise out of the scientific community however they are still there in Scientific American and everywhere else.

For example a recent article I was reading in a science magazine which shall remain nameless (though I can certainly point you to it if you are interested) suggested that carbon dioxide from china would cause acid rain in the U.S. I was baffled by this. I had never heard of CO2 causing acid rain, how could that be possible?

After a little investigation online I discovered that there was research indicating that it was normal for CO2 molecules to be separated within the atmosphere and fall to earth as very slightly acidic rain. However the acidity was not greater than the average acidity of regular rainwater, and it was possible the carbon-laced water was beneficial to the soil.

In other words it was not what is meant by the term "acid rain." In fact acid rain was originally defined as rain with a lower pH than that created by this exact CO2 process.

Anyhow the errors are more obvious in media productions. Watch 20/20's next global warming piece and you are sure to notice a few. Usually it is rife with statements about how the earth will have more storms with heavy rainfall, more clouds, and yet be a drier, hotter climate.

The PBS series "Voyage to Planet Earth" attributed deterioration of the Louisiana coastline to rising sea levels. They even went so far as to suggest that some of the trees sticking up out of the water must have been on land once. You want to know why this is absurd? It is absurd because long before the global warming debate ever even began the Army core of engineers visited Louisiana and basically "fixed the Mississippi." That is, rivers tend to meander and flood. Thanks to systems of dams and levees put in by the Army Core of Engineers, the Mississippi no longer floods annually, and no longer meanders.

This is great news for nearby towns that could be very quickly taken out by a river changing its course. However it was very quickly discovered that it was bad news for the coastline which was replenished via silt washed downstream during floods. With the inability to get new silt deposits on to the wetlands of the Mississippi delta, and the continuing flow of water through this area the coastline started getting washed away.

This effect was discovered and explained a long time ago. Its cause is known. Meanwhile it is also fairly well known in Louisiana that trees do in fact grow in water. Louisiana's Bayous are full of trees.

Meanwhile the news specials definitely proving that human caused global warming have caused the number intense hurricanes to increase almost always lack that crucial bit of argumentations that actually link the humans to the phenomenon. I saw a whole special once that claimed to "definitively prove global warming" and even had supposed former skeptics renouncing their skepticism with the new findings. The show was based on research that showed a correlation between increased sea-water temperatures and an increase in the intensity and frequency of hurricanes. Where was the crucial link that proved humans made the water warmer? The issue was not even discussed. It was taken as a fact.

Meanwhile credible climatologists will tell you that it takes many hundreds of years for a known climate change to impact oceanic temperature by just a couple of degrees. This data actually comes from ice coring among other places. They can show how a huge volcanic eruption changed the average global temperature, dropping it by 10 degrees or something of that sort. Meanwhile a few centuries later the ocean water temp also lowered a couple degrees.

I could go on all day. Honestly. I can email anyone who is interested articles in scientific American that present evidence that clearly indicates x, which could dispute the notion of global warming, that are concluded with paragraphs that literally state the exact opposite.

Imagine summing up an article for a well respected magazine with statements to the exact contrary of all the evidence and interpretations you have just presented.

Okay, there is more but I need to break this up a bit so that will be all for now.