Going Against the Green

Well I only hope that by ignoring my ego's impulses and swallowing my pride, I can gain your trust in the future as being objective and honest. The book Trina gave to me by the Nobel scientist has a chapter claiming that Global Warming is a scam. Thankfully, she had mentioned this beforehand, so I prepared myself by forcing myself to maintain an open mind. He made a good case, so I followed his advice and did some investigating. The reasons why Global Warming in general isn't happening are a lot harder for me to explain, but it seems that results from shoddy research have been greatly exaggerated, and the computer programs used to predict climate change are shitty programs, and the earth naturally warms and cool over the centuries naturally, so we'd have to look a lot further back than 1900. It is true that 1998 was likely the warmest year of the millennium, but that's no cause for alarm in and of itself. Also, if you looked at an annual mean temperature graph for the last century, it would appear to be rising, but that's no reason to prepare for an apocalypse. 100 years is nothing. If the trend continues and we start breaking records every year then I'll start to wonder, but hey, wasn't it -40 in Golden a few weeks ago? Anyways, onto the myths....

Holes in the Ozone: We've been taught that because of all the CO2 we've put into the air, it has SOMEHOW drifted to the north and south poles, creating holes that will heat up the earth. It turns out ozone is completely regenerative. Ironically, when UV rays run into oxygen, ozone is made (O2 ---> O3), so if there are holes being made, they're perpetually patching themselves up quite nicely, and as long as there's oxygen for us to survive, there's oxygen to regenerate the ozone. Now keeping that information in mind, we can see why there actually ARE holes in the ozone above the poles. This is because not enough UV rays come through to make turn O2 into O3, and if there's not enough UV rays to do that, there's certainly not enough to warm anything up. Also, these holes naturally increase and decrease with the seasons, but they the two pole's holes are inversely proportional to each other, thus creating a balance.

Polar Ice Caps Melting: Take a bucket, add some water and some ice cubes. When the ice cubes melt, does the water level go up or down? It goes down. If the polar ice caps melted, would the ocean level go up or down? They'd go down. I can't believe I never thought about it. Whatever got me believing the opposite must've been some pretty potent propaganda. However, take into consideration that while the Arctic’s melting ice WOULDN'T raise the ocean level, Antarctica’s melting ice would. This is because Antarctica is on land, hence it being the 7th continent. So IF the ice melted, it WOULD melt raise the water level, BUT the average temperature in Antarctica these days is -50*C, so we don't have much to worry about.

Now this isn't to say that the environmental movement is a scam. There's not strong evidence saying that the Earth is warming up, but I haven't ruled it out yet. Lung cancer/asthma, air/ocean pollution, and deforestation are still horrible things. I still have to rethink this whole Global Warming thing before I will know how many of my eco-beliefs are affected by these revelations, but hey, I'd rather be informed than ignorant. btw, do your own research, the article I found to be the most useful is here.

Warsawpack - Valdez