A look into 'global warming'

This week we turn the calendar back to 1859. It was just 150 years ago that a scientist named John Tyndall did some experiments with vapors produced by burning coal oil and concluded these gasses had an effect on temperature.   In the 1890s a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, took this another step and developed estimates of how much and how fast global warming would take place. Many didn’t agree, but even those that did weren’t overly alarmed. Arrhenius projected centuries would pass before any serious harm was done. 

Other scientists began making a closer study of weather patterns. As decades passed some said we were warming much faster than Arrhenius had predicted, and the issue heated up.     

In 1971 scientists from 14 nations met in Stockholm to discuss climate. Some thought the earth was warming, some cooling, but the consensus was that neither was good and people were to blame.   1981 was reportedly the warmest year recorded to date. We were told in the late 80s there were only ten years to save the planet. The Villach Conference followed, then the Montreal Protocol and the Toronto Conference. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established, followed by the creation of the Global Climate Coalition. Emission controls of the 1980s and 90s were said to be inadequate and temperatures increasing even faster than previously projected. The Kyoto treaty went into effect, without the U.S. signing on, and by 2007 IPCC issued a report stating that warming was still accelerating and a crisis was at hand.

In March of this year 2,000 scientists met in Copenhagen and issued a report saying, in part: “The worst- case projections, or even worse, are being realized.”     

But the other side has scientists as well, and they have an entirely different opinion. Some say we’re now entering a cooling period. They tell us the earth has always had warming and cooling cycles and man has nothing to do with them. We’re told more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition attesting that human activity has not caused climate change. 

I don’t know which side is right, and the media gives us only their bias.   On December 3rd CNN ran on their website a lead story about a village in Alaska that was about to fall into the sea because of melting ice. At the same time the featured story on Fox had to do with allegations of doctored results and the refusal of prominent warming advocates to allow peer review of their core data, some of which has been destroyed. CNN would rather be slow roasted than carry anything that questions global warming, while Fox scrambles for stories that do just that.   The media can’t be trusted on this; neither can Rush Limbaugh, and I don’t trust Al Gore on anything.    

 Detailed records on climate have been kept around the world for over 100 years, and scientists should be able to add up the number and get the same total. But they don’t. Something’s rotten in Denmark, and I doubt the December Copenhagen conference will do much to clear the air.     

Roy Marshall is a local historian. E-mail him at news@redoakexpress.com.