Snowballs in Hell: fallacies of the global warming debate
Feature Editorial
Christopher Skeet
Issue date: 5/5/08 Section: Opinions
Regular readers of the Chicago Flame probably know by now that I'm politically conservative and, as such, there are certain stereotypes designated to me by the urban university mindset. I've long since given up trying to hide the glaring fact that I spend my moonshine-induced evenings engaging in sexual intercourse with toothless family members, while contemplating the sadistic joy I'd wallow in from reading (if only I were literate) Fox News articles on death toll predictions for the next Bushitler crusade against oil-owning non-Christians. Having said that, there is one stereotype in which I don't fit the traditional neo-Nazi reactionary mold, and that is the assumption that I'm unconcerned with the state of our planet.
Scraping the nadir of ideological ignorance has yet to callous me to the cause of environmentalism. This doesn't mean that I'm one of these rent-a-protester types who refuses to bathe and advocates we all live naked and eat grass. But I do believe that taking care of our world is an obligation (I'd say "individual responsibility", but I realize that term is the secular leftist's equivalent to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno).
It goes without saying that the biggest environmental issue of our day is global warming, or the theory that our planet's temperature is unnaturally increasing as a direct result of manmade pollution. Now, I have nothing against this theory, it seems plausible enough to me. But there are scientists who argue against this theory, and I'm interested in what they have to say too. I'm not going to buy into the global warming theory just because it would fit nicely into my political ideology.
The World Meteorological Organization concedes that global temperatures have not risen in a decade (BBC News, Apr. 4), and that when they did rise in 1998, it was the direct result of the El Nino storm. In Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged that global temperatures have plateaued. Furthermore, NASA's Aqua satellite, launched in 2002, has collected atmospheric data showing that last decade's warming resulted in weather processes compensating for the change and limiting the greenhouse effect on their own (The Australian, Mar. 22). This means that if humans refuse to reform, the earth will do it for us.
Scraping the nadir of ideological ignorance has yet to callous me to the cause of environmentalism. This doesn't mean that I'm one of these rent-a-protester types who refuses to bathe and advocates we all live naked and eat grass. But I do believe that taking care of our world is an obligation (I'd say "individual responsibility", but I realize that term is the secular leftist's equivalent to the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno).
It goes without saying that the biggest environmental issue of our day is global warming, or the theory that our planet's temperature is unnaturally increasing as a direct result of manmade pollution. Now, I have nothing against this theory, it seems plausible enough to me. But there are scientists who argue against this theory, and I'm interested in what they have to say too. I'm not going to buy into the global warming theory just because it would fit nicely into my political ideology.
The World Meteorological Organization concedes that global temperatures have not risen in a decade (BBC News, Apr. 4), and that when they did rise in 1998, it was the direct result of the El Nino storm. In Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged that global temperatures have plateaued. Furthermore, NASA's Aqua satellite, launched in 2002, has collected atmospheric data showing that last decade's warming resulted in weather processes compensating for the change and limiting the greenhouse effect on their own (The Australian, Mar. 22). This means that if humans refuse to reform, the earth will do it for us.
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