An inconvenient truth

The title of today's column is also the title of Al Gore's documentary about global warming that, in very large part, won him the Nobel Prize this past year. In today's political climate, most Democrats support the idea of global warming, most Republicans don't. Some aren't sure. I'm not sure either. And I don't think anyone should be sure enough to use the word "truth" in a title about the idea of global warming.

Truth suggests fact. But, the truth of the matter in regards to global warming is that it is theory, not fact. There are certainly signs that suggest it might be happening, but there are also signs that it's not. The global warming advocates say that science is on their side, but that's only a partial truth. Some scientists are on their side, but there are a significant number of scientists who believe that global warming is NOT occurring, including some top-of-the line meteorologists including John Coleman and Joe Bastardi.

People who have dedicated their entire lives to studying the weather have certainly earned our ear when it comes to the give and take of what we are or are not doing to our planet. Bastardi, the long-range weather forecaster from Accuweather, contends that no one can make educated guesses about climate change by looking only at temperatures and storminess over the past few years. He contends that weather patterns ebb and flow, literally over eons, in response to natural rather than man-made climate change.

He says we have had cold periods and warm periods and stormy periods and calm periods throughout recorded history and the things we're going through now are much more likely to fall into a natural climactic response rather than being caused by man.

This logic made sense to me so I did a little investigating on my own and quickly found that he was, of course, right. We've gone through warm and stormy periods across the globe long before automobiles and the innumerable pollutants of today. He also suggests we're at the peak of the current warmth cycle and are about to see a trend towards colder temperatures. I'm not a natural scientist, so I don't have any way to confirm or reject that notion, other than to yield to his decades of experience and his degrees in meteorology from Penn State University.

Of course, the other side makes sense too. It's hard for the average human being to be aware of the tremendous amount of pollution we release into the atmosphere every single day not to think it doesn't have some kind of effect on temperature and climate. Our logic tells us that nothing is unbreakable and nothing lasts forever. In fact, the more we use something, the sooner it will wear out, so we use that logic about our planet as well. The more we abuse it, the more we litter it, the more we pollute it, the faster we will destroy it.

But the critics of global warming contend this is faulty logic when it's applied to this huge, incredible eco-system we all inhabit. They say the logic is faulty because the earth is dynamic, not static. They say the earth is self-sustaining and able to heal itself, unlike all the other finite things we use on a daily basis that will eventually break down. That makes sense too.

I don't know how long it will be before we have a definitive answer to this question. But I think it is incredibly premature and embarrassingly arrogant to treat global warming as a fact when the scientific community remains so divided and that's the biggest criticism I have of the whole process. Global warming has become a cultural reality because certain important people have simply declared it to be true and, because most people are followers and not leaders, we are seduced by the certainty of the "experts" words and line up in lock-step behind them, simply dismissing or failing to even listen to those who have a different perspective.

Of course, we do this in every area of our lives so it's not surprising we would do it with global warming too. We get ourselves in a lot of messes when we do that.