If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when people take science and corrupt it for their own political ends. In recent years, global warming has been – pardon the pun – a rather hot topic; hardly a day goes by when you don’t hear about it in one form or another. The environmentalists have championed the theory, the right-wingers have dismissed it as propaganda, and everything in between. For every Inconvenient Truth (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/) there’s a Great Global Warming Swindle (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1020027/). We have to be more energy-efficient. We have to drive hybrids. There’s not a scientific “consensus”. Etc., etc., etc.

It wears on one’s nerves. And though I’m surely to be labeled a “global warming denier” or something equally as asinine, I’d like to explore what it IS, and what it IS NOT.

Global warming was originally an extrapolation from a predictive climate model. Depending on how you tweak the parameters, the same model will predict global cooling, or global temperature-not-changing-at-all. Granted, it does make logical sense. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and levels are elevated due to human activity, therefore human activity is causing the Earth’s temperature to increase. But overly simplistic, albeit rational, explanations such as these have no place in an essentially chaotic system such as climate. (Side note: some models will predict that heating actually causes cooling in the long run: more heat causes more water vapour in the air, which causes more clouds, which reflect more sunlight away from the Earth, which causes the planet to cool)

Global warming is not something that can be tested scientifically. One big problem is that we only have one planet to “experiment” on. Even if we could somehow test multiple Earths in the laboratory, there are far too many variables to be able to pin down the effects of a single one. At the end of the day, it comes down to what is statistically likely. To put it more bluntly, the idea that humans are going to cause a significant increase in the average temperature of the planet is a guess. An educated guess, to be fair, and one that is backed up by historical data such as graphs of atmospheric CO2 levels and temperature:

So I’m certainly not trying to say that it is a “myth” or that it is “impossible” or anything of that sort. There is a clear correlation in that graph, which lends support (but certainly does not prove) to the idea that man-made cardon dioxide can increase Earth’s temperature.

But even if it turns out to be wrong, the rest of the environmentalist message is still absolutely correct. Use less electricity. Drive more fuel-efficient cars. We KNOW that pollution from car exhaust and coal power plants kills tens of thousands of people annually; there would be no downside to getting rid of that. And maybe global warming alarmism is what we needed to give us a kick in the “green” direction. Hell, if all it means is the demise of the hideously obnoxious Hummer H2, then it is absolutely worth it.

Just… seriously… it’s not a political platform, it’s not a news headline attention-grabber, it’s a bloody computer model. It’s not even scary anymore; sorry, fear-mongering media, you’ll have to find something new to frighten us with.

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