Global warming: elusive, economically problematic for American taxpayers

A recent BBC News article headline read "What happened to global warming?"That's a good question.

As temperatures around the globe continue to drop, so does the public's concern with the issue. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that only 57 percent of Americans believe there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, and only 36 percent believe this warming is being caused by man-made activities, down from 77 percent and 47 percent, respectively, in 2007.

In July 2008, a prominent Australian scientist resigned, concluding that even after six years of focused research and $50 billion, he found no evidence that carbon dioxide was causing global warming. Later that year, over 31,000 U.S. scientists signed a petition publicly rejecting the global warming theory.

This January, 700 scientists around the globe delivered a 255-page report to the Senate challenging the existence of man-made global warming. Some NASA reports have even suggested that a cycle of global cooling is beginning.

Despite the evidence piling up against the theory of man-made global warming, climate alarmists seem more intent than ever on forcing enormous pieces of climate legislation like the Waxman-Markey bill. This bill is estimated to cause gross domestic product losses of $9.4 trillion, raise an average family's energy bill $1,241 and eliminate 1,145,000 jobs by 2035.

While the absurdity of forcing a costly bill through Congress on false pretenses speaks for itself, what is most disturbing about the scare over global warming and Washington's reaction to it is that all of this paranoia has yet to be supported by any scientific evidence.

When the theory of global warming was first introduced, there was reason to believe there could be a connection between rising temperatures throughout the 1990s and increasing amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, an inconvenient truth for many climate alarmists is that the hottest year of the 1990s was 1998. Since then, temperatures have been steadily dropping as part of the Earth's natural cycle of heating and cooling.

It is subsequently no coincidence that after 1998 the public witnessed "global warming" re-branded "global climate change." Since data showed that the world was no longer warming, millions of people who had jumped on the global warming bandwagon, including thousands of scientists whose funding depended on their ability to continue proving that global warming existed, had to rename their apocalyptic theory or risk witnessing the world lose interest in and reject it.

While what occurred was a re-branding of the global warming theory, what failed to occur was the development of new hypotheses that global warming wasn't occurring. Instead, scientists and media alarmists chose to devise a way this cycle of cooling could be worked into their global warming theory.

Armed with inconclusive evidence, unpredictable and primitive climate models and a movie starring Al Gore, eco-groups embarked on a new crusade: to convince the world that Earth's cooling was only temporary and would eventually lead to greater warming in the future if immediate "action" was not taken. While this conclusion is humorously illogical and lacks scientific evidence, it has been accepted by many as fact thanks to irrational hysteria and media publicity.

What hangs in the balance of the "global climate change" debate are several pieces of legislation, including a significant cap-and-trade bill, that will kill jobs, cost taxpayers trillions and will do nothing to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

Does a doctor give a patient an expensive, lengthy and risky surgery if it is completely unnecessary?

In 2007, Time magazine boldly declared that the debate over global warming was over. This is false, and an increasing amount of evidence continues to pile up that proves it.

In the meantime, grab your coat, because everything from NASA to The Old Farmer's Almanac is predicting a long, freezing winter.



--Brereton is a senior from Dayton, Ohio majoring in anthropology.

opinion@thedepauw.com