I leave for school today with my twenty-eight page manuscript to turn into English class. My English teacher assigned the class to write a book about a controversial topic of choice. I chose global warming. At first I was discouraged, because the four books with the opposite viewpoint of mine kept showing how scientists had predicted things in the past that don’t hold true today due to lack of technology in the past. There was even a whole chapter in one book regarding the Hockey Stick controversy that had supposedly proven that during the Renaissance earth’s temperatures were much higher than the level they have risen over the last hundred years.
I couldn’t let it be at that. I turned on the news and saw parts of Greenland surfacing from ice that had covered it for thousands of years. I saw miles of coral reef bleaching in the sun. I saw areas once covered with ice suddenly blooming with wildflowers. And this was all before I saw An Inconvenient Truth. I knew something just wasn’t right. How could these scientists deny what was going on around them?
I found out that the author of one of the books I read was being paid by Exxon Mobil (Patrick J. Michaels). I found out that the author of an article included in the book was also on Mobil’s payroll (Robert C. Balling). Funny, the two probably met at the bank. That was quite a discovery. I would have to include that in my argumentative paper. After all, our teaches stressed the importance of considering our sources. I couldn’t find one scientist that agreed with Kyoto that was being paid by oil companies.
The main argument of another writer, Thomas Gale Moore, was that global warming was a good thing. We would all be much happier if December was 75 degrees. After all, mankind flourished 6,000 years ago, and boy was it hot!
Alas, the planet is beginning to speak for herself. Conservatives can no longer pretend that the evidence has been faked, such as they try to do with evolution and the round-world idea. Scientists can pocket their oil money as much as they want and die happy, rich deaths before the rest of us are left to clean up the mess, but it won’t change the facts. They can argue “not enough evidence has been gathered” until they are blue in the face, but advocates of the earth have met their burden of proof and all these skeptics have to go on are a couple of rogue scientists fighting for the future of Exxon. Like the hole in the O-zone they tried to deny for years, there was not enough evidence at one time in the past to prove climate change. Technology has come a long way and has proven both the O-zone crisis and global warming to be real. Read it and weep, guys. Even a community college student can show these skeptic-tologists to be wrong.
Sources:
Michaels, Patrick J., ed. Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005.
Moore, Thomas Gale. Climate of Fear: Why we Shouldn’t Worry about Global Warming. Washington DC: Cato Insititute, 1998.
Cooper, Mary H. “Global Warming.” Congressional Quarterly. CQ Researcher. Folsom Lake College, EDC library. 29 Jan. 2007. <http//www.cqresearcher.com>
Plus, there are many websites that report scientists (I use the term loosely) who are being paid by Exxon. Enjoy your Techron, guys.
