How Evidence for Global Warming Loses Heat Up Close.

The evidence for global warming is complex, highly emotional and extremely dubious.

For those who don’t following environmental news, global warming is a diagnostic theory developed to explain several dramatic events and climatologic developments in recent history. 

The theory asserts that man-made pollutants are causing the climate world-wide to heat up in imperceptible steps, but also in ways that allow us to track its course. 

This climatic heating may cause catastrophic disasters for human civilization in the near future. 

The term Global Warming” was introduced for the first time to wide swathes of the American public in 2004, by the movie An Inconvenient Truth, featuring Vice President Al Gore.

The movie was out to rouse the public, and it succeeded in this, but perhaps too well. 

Gore is a leading Democratic, and a huge population of reactionary right-wingers immediately began an ideological war to refute the simplest factual evidence for global warming in the film (apparently, if Al Gore says the sky is blue, it’s not).

This confuses the issue at hand though. Global Warming is not so much an Inconvenient Truth as An Uncomfortable Theory Designed To Scare The Hell Out of You.

There are no Actual Facts About Climate Change

Like any film designed to urge people to action, An Inconvenient Truth suffers from exaggeration. 

There are also hundreds of facts cited in the film, and in that swarm of data there are errors. 

In fact, one lawsuit brought about in Great Britain by right-leaning educators declared that the film was riddled with errors and unworthy of being shown in English school. 

This was perhaps the strongest legal challenge to the evidence for global warming in public debates. 

Other challenges have been polemic, for the most part. Serious scientific objections have also been raised. 

One particular problem has been the creation of the Intergovernmental Panel For Climate Change (IPCC), under the auspices of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). 

The work of the United Nations became fairly unendurable for many conservative and moderately inclined Americans during the 1960, 70’s, and 80’s, an era when the Third World used its numerical advantage in the General Assembly and lack of interest in the Cold War to heap diplomatic abuse on the United States.

The development of systemic corruption in agencies such as UNESCO resulted in legal convictions and jail for leading members of the UN, and lost the organization most of its credibility with the vast majority of the American public. 

So although much of the world may see the IPCC’s collection of evidence for global warming as convincing and powerful, many are happy to dismiss everything the IPCC says. 

Serious scientific debate can be hard to follow, but anyone with a real interest in the threat of global warming can quickly scan the entries in serious online encyclopedias, journals and other literature. 

What you will find there is a debate over degree, not definition. 

The burning of fossil fuels by internal combustion engines during the last hundred years is not seen trivial, but rather as certain to cause many deep changes in the earth’s climate. 

No-One Has Been Around Long Enough to Test these Theories

But is climate change necessarily a bad thing? Before our relatively new existence, the Earth’s atmosphere was composed primarily of CO2.

Strange new plant species arose that essentially poisoned the environment with oxygen. The Earth may simply be returning to it’s natural state.

The speed at which these changes are realized, the degree of danger they pose, the ability of mankind to reverse them, and the exact mechanisms that will bring these changes into being are the areas of debate. 

It is the absence of serious scientific rejections of the evidence for global warming that are the strongest arguments in its favor, although this can also be said for the Emperors New Clothes. 

Fear is a great silencer.