September, 2007
An Inconvenient Conjecture
Bryan Griffin
I was on my way to class, at about 1 in the afternoon in February at the University of Florida and it was cold. I mean, freezing. I had bundled up, but apparently not enough, because halfway to class I began to quicken my pace to end the misery. Just that morning, I had heard about the record snowfall in New York recently, something to the tune of 140 inches of snow over the weekend. Nightly, freeze warnings would roll across my television screen reminding residents of Gainesville to protect plants and crops from possible damages. And then I stop. I look around, and I begin to notice that the "independent" campus newspaper had an irregularly large headline that day. My fellow students were standing around me, in hats, scarves, mittens, jackets and sweaters, and the way they were brandishing the newspapers almost made it seem they were holding signs: the opened newspapers clutched in both fists at about chest height and held outright to read. The headline, surprise surprise, spreading the propaganda and lies of the political left and their ploy to use the environment to get a vote.
The hype extended by the liberal media and political figureheads of today like Al Gore about Global Warming is a cockeyed exaggeration and a political ploy to gain votes in 2008. Senate committees and international organizations can draw whatever conjectures they want; the "epidemic" and earth-ending panic has got to stop. The media must stop using conjecture as fact.
As it turned out when I read the article, the "confirmation" of global warming, presented as a fact in big bold letters deserving front page attention, was merely the conclusion of one professor who had reviewed a collection of "experts" who had reviewed a collection of scientific documents that had warned of a possible 3.5 to 8 degree temperature change in the next 100 years. And what was included of the predictive scientific report, used the words "could", "possibly" and "may" so many times the idea of a "confirmed" epidemic began to seem like a "confirmed" win for Al Gore in 2000.
My girlfriend in Tampa was required to watch "An Inconvenient Truth" in her environmental studies class. She told me as the movie played, the teacher had to constantly stop the DVD and correct the scientific mistakes the ex-vice president’s film made, and that this was no rare occasion. She says the various shots used as concrete "evidence" were so selective and generalized that it hardly constituted anything of a factual documentary. Does a montage of random dying animals that happen to live on the polar ice caps and hazily presented sequences of icebergs melting confirm an epidemic? Can we make a documentary on the world being run by rodents if we compile an entire movie of the furry creatures in specifically chosen settings doing specifically captured things?
I also find it very difficult to trust temperature readings from any type of human-made device that is over a hundred years old, especially one that could record "global atmospheric temperatures" while the light bulb was still in the works. A hot summer and a melted glacier does not mean that this is a world-wide trend. The Earth constantly changes, species constantly adapt to new environments, and continents, as we may remember, move. Oh yea, and our planet circles a gigantic ball of fire with a core temperature of around twenty-four million and a half degrees Fahrenheit.
Among the variety of changes our world continually encounters, there is not to be forgotten, but also not to be reviewed by the media, a sun constantly prone to sunspots and differential surface heating. A sun, a burning star, Earth’s only source of heat that hangs in a delicate balance within our solar system with no guarantee of eternal continuity.
Why don’t we look at the epidemic scientifically. We need a control, a planet with no human interaction to prove that we are or aren’t causing ours to heat. Mars. Mars has a much higher atmospheric carbon dioxide percentage than earth. This has existed for millions of years because mars has had no photosynthetic vegetation to convert any of it to oxygen And yet, Mars is in an ice age. Scientifically, this would disprove the greenhouse effect alone. But looking even further provides another shocking development. Mars is currently warming, as reported by NASA, due to recent solar activity. Mars can be affected by solar fluctuations but our Earth is immune? I will trust NASA’s assessment of planet-wide temperature fluctuations over the past few years gathered with recent technology. I will not get hysterical over "scientific" theories about the earth’s changing temperature using century-old technology and compiled conjecture.
Here’s another modern study I found more confirmable. A scientific report in California found a cow in a pasture to produce, on average, 600 liters of methane alone in a days time, via natural digestion. When the millions of cows in California alone are taken into consideration, and then combined with the exponentially larger amount worldwide, the all-natural animals are contributing more global greenhouses gases than we are! The Kyoto Treaty has recognized methane as a serious problem contributing to global warming. Should we start at the heart of the problem to save our planet from certain doom? Is everyone hungry for a burger?
Maybe we could start at the real heart of the problem and stuff a sock in the hot-air spewing liberals and leftist "independent" media sources that want to perpetuate this preposterous predicament.
To be clearly understood, I am entirely in favor of decreasing pollution on earth, conserving materials, and reusing what we consume. However, the fact and hype that are purported by the current liberal agenda must be seen for what it is, and what it can become. It is a political ploy that will be carried to any length to get a vote, or as democrats love to cling to, "a change". Worse, it is a political maneuver that will inhibit our liberties in the future. The way the liberal agenda is headed, the government will be controlling so many of our rights as creatures of this earth to use it, that we will have to ask for permission to take a car trip, or fly an airplane, or do anything that may perpetuate ‘global warming‘. I am deathly afraid of the world my children will live in when a permit is necessary to drive to the store, purchase a chemical, or move themselves in any way through our free country. It sounds like the only epidemic at hand is a reversion to a leftist government with communist-like solutions to control a "confirmed" global warming.