2008 Woodie Awards
It's getting so hot in here
With all the hype in the news, is this man made scare even real?
John Sieglaff
Issue date: 2/15/07 Section: Opinions
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Many people the world over believe that global warming is an issue that must be handled as soon as possible. The mainstream belief of most environmentalists and liberals is that the hole in the ozone layer is allowing heat to enter the earth with much more ease than before and then being trapped within the atmosphere of the earth through the way of the greenhouse effect.
Global warming is a touchy subject. Many people feel very strongly about it and will get offended as though a bad word against the idea is a personal attack on them. Make no mistake about this article. I am not out to offend anyone.
Furthermore, I am not here to say that global warming is not occurring either. My point is simple. We don't know. No one does. It could be happening and it could not be happening. However, I do think those who argue about global warming use many logical fallacies.
In the film, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore claims as a fact that 2005 was the hottest year yet. First of all, since when do we listen to Al Gore; the man who once claimed to have invented the Internet? But in Al Gore's defense, for all I know this is truth-but that only goes back to the days of humanity which brings me to my second point.
I think that's one of the biggest fallacies of the idea we call global warming. We are looking at a small piece of history. Humans have been on earth for roughly six thousand years and in only two hundred of those years have we done anything that has damaged the environment.
We should be looking at a wider range of history. We do know things about prehistoric times. Just because we don't have cold hard facts or recorded numbers of the climate back then, doesn't mean that we don't have ways of extracting information about times long ago.
Tree ring width, fossilized plant remains, insect and pollen frequencies in sediments, glacial deposits, and marine organism fossils are only some of the ways climatologists can reconstruct what earth's past climate was like. By using these techniques, scientists have concluded that average temperatures were eight to fifteen degrees Celsius warmer than they are in present day.
Global warming is a touchy subject. Many people feel very strongly about it and will get offended as though a bad word against the idea is a personal attack on them. Make no mistake about this article. I am not out to offend anyone.
Furthermore, I am not here to say that global warming is not occurring either. My point is simple. We don't know. No one does. It could be happening and it could not be happening. However, I do think those who argue about global warming use many logical fallacies.
In the film, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore claims as a fact that 2005 was the hottest year yet. First of all, since when do we listen to Al Gore; the man who once claimed to have invented the Internet? But in Al Gore's defense, for all I know this is truth-but that only goes back to the days of humanity which brings me to my second point.
I think that's one of the biggest fallacies of the idea we call global warming. We are looking at a small piece of history. Humans have been on earth for roughly six thousand years and in only two hundred of those years have we done anything that has damaged the environment.
We should be looking at a wider range of history. We do know things about prehistoric times. Just because we don't have cold hard facts or recorded numbers of the climate back then, doesn't mean that we don't have ways of extracting information about times long ago.
Tree ring width, fossilized plant remains, insect and pollen frequencies in sediments, glacial deposits, and marine organism fossils are only some of the ways climatologists can reconstruct what earth's past climate was like. By using these techniques, scientists have concluded that average temperatures were eight to fifteen degrees Celsius warmer than they are in present day.
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