Confessions of a global warming denier

by Brandon Law

Yesterday when I heard on the local country radio station that Tim McGraw and Faith Hill were slated to participate in Al Gore’s Live Earth concert series this summer to enhance awareness about the theory of global warming, I began to realize just how mainstream the belief in the theory has become. Not only has it become mainstream given the fact that it is supported by all the front-runners of both parties for the next Presidential election cycle, but the hype has reached absurd levels as evidenced by one news Web site that ran a headline entitled, “Global warming concerns are keeping children awake at night.” Now, I’m just as environmentally friendly as the next guy, but I have my doubts about the theory of global warming. I ride my bike or walk to class every day, eat a relatively vegan organic diet, recycle my consumer waste, etc., but still find the self-proclaimed inventor-of-the-internet’s latest product more politically expedient than scientifically sound. Not only is the theory still relatively new on the scientific landscape, but I still find it contradictory to conventional—dare I say—scientific wisdom of just 30 years ago as I recently discovered by a trip to our campus library. I was prompted to further investigation by Dennis Miller’s display of a story during a recent appearance on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show,” from the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek magazine entitled, “Cooling World.” I was curious to see whether the story that predicted an impending ice age was just an anomaly or a widely supported theory among the contemporary scientific community. In the 1970s the prevailing view amongst the scientific community was that a global ice age was imminent. The National Academy of Sciences in 1975 issued a report stating that there was, “a finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the earth within the next 100 years.” I found three books in our campus library, that I believe represent a fair cross-section of the scientific thought regarding climate change in the 1970s: The Cooling (1976), Ice or Fire (1978), and Forecasts, Famines, and Freezes (1976). The authors made many statements in these books predicting an impending ice age evidenced mainly by a sustained trend of declining temperatures and a growth or extension of the polar ice caps. Two ideas bandied about in the books to remedy the growth of the ice caps and impending worldwide death and destruction by ice were to spread black carbon on the ice in order to attract the sun’s rays to heat and melt it, and to dam the Bering Strait in order to prevent the mixing of warm and cool ocean water. Contrary to news commentators eager to spin the “heat waves” of last summer as new evidence proving the theory of global warming, the contemporary scientific community is not united on views regarding the theory of global warming. Nigel Calder, in an article in the UK edition of The Sunday Times Online, scoffed at the recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and pointed out that the Earth’s temperature hasn’t changed since 1999 and asserted that solar activity, rather than greenhouse gases has been responsible for fluctuations in global temperatures in the past and is most likely responsible for the current mild temperature changes. He alluded to the findings of Ohio State University’s Dr. David Bromwich by also pointing out that, “[w]hile sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8 percent in the Southern Ocean.” In a recent article published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Patrick J. Michaels poked fun at Al Gore’s “Greenland suddenly melts” doomsday scenario and emphasized that Al Gore’s projection of sea level rising by 12 feet is at odds with the IPCC’s estimates of a rise of about 17 inches. After Hurricane Katrina, which was supposedly caused by global warming, I recall “experts” on the news predicting that the next hurricane season would make Hurricane Katrina pale in comparison, due to severity. However, the next hurricane season (last year) was more of a whimper than a bang. Though Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman recently equated deniers of the theory of global warming with Holocaust deniers, I’ll take my chances. Hi, my name is Brandon Law, and I’m a global warming denier.