Why You Shouldn't Care About Global Warming
CONTEXT WARNING: I wrote this in 2007. At the time I wrote it, I believed it. I no longer do. I leave the article here because there is nothing to be gained by hiding from your past.
Anyone who's seen Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth undoubtedly knows all the sordid facts about global warming. CO2 emissions are running wild and it's all our fault, and the Earth's temperature is getting hotter every year. Personally, I don't buy it, and I'll tell you why: the very basis of the global warming argument is faulty.
Now, on the surface this doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd be covering on this website. This isn't a social activist website, after all, but a crusade against laziness and stupidity. Normally you'd be right, but this is a special case: global warming is being used by fear-mongers to fuel political campaigns, and to keep society in a perpetual state of fear. That means it influences others in a significantly negative way, which is the main criteria for getting me to write about something. So why have I waited until now to write about global warming? Because now is the time when the very basis for the argument has been shown to be complete and utter bullshit.
There are two arguments used to rally people behind global warming:
- Man-made CO2 emissions are rising at a critical rate, causing the greenhouse effect
- The Earth's temperature is going up as a result of those CO2 emissions
It doesn't matter what the scientific arguments are: these are the arguments as they are presented to the public by lobbyists and politicians. Yes, they are inaccurate, but we'll ignore that for now. So let's demolish these arguments in order, shall we?
First of all, even if man-made CO2 emissions are going up, it doesn't matter. Let's ignore for a minute the fact that a cow's methane is 20x as damaging as CO2 and pretend that CO2 is the real problem. There are some facts you need to take in to consideration before talking about our CO2 production. The following information comes from the Timaru Herald back in May 2007. They have pulled down their copy of the article, as you can plainly see, but I have preserved it in its entirety here:
- Water vapour is responsible for 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect
- Carbon Dioxide only contributes 3.6% to the greenhouse effect
- Of that 3.6%, only 3.2% is contributed by man
So what does that mean? It means the collective CO2 contribution of all mankind across the planet is a whole 0.115%. We couldn't change the planet's temperature if we tried.
However, the planet's temperature is going up anyway, isn't it? I mean NASA's data shows it to be so, so it must be true. A recent discovery, however, completely discredits that data. That discovery? NASA's formula suffered from the Y2K problem!
That's right: NASA, arguably the most technologically advanced entity on the face of the planet, had faulty data coming in for ten years that wasn't even noticed. Follow that link for the full article, but here's the gist of it:
- There were random unaccountable jumps in temperature data within the United States starting around January 2000
- Those jumps were to significantly higher temperatures than those from years before
- After the error was identified, the new formula was applied, and the data tabulated, temperatures for the last ten years dropped by as much as 0.14 degrees
The end result is that 1998 is no longer the warmest year on the books, half the top 10 are before World War 2, and the years 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 were all cooler than 1900. Notice that 1999 and 2001 were not: that means the temperature has not been going up steadily at all, since 2002 was cooler than 2001, and 2000 was cooler than 1999.
Now, the global impact on the warming trend that this discovery induces is only about 1-2%, since this is only referring to the United States, but it raises a highly relevant question: if NASA, arguably the most technologically advanced entity on the planet, can have information that faulty, how can anybody trust any other nation's temperature data without a full audit of it to check for errors?
Of course, even if it turns out the temperature in the rest of the world is found to be significantly hotter than it has been thus far recorded, it still won't matter because the Earth goes through vast cycles of warming and cooling anyway. Nobody denies global warming is taking place, because global warming has been happening for the last 18,000 years, and occurs roughly every 100,000 years.
So what does all this mean? I'm glad you asked. It means that not only is the information you've been handed for the last ten years incorrect, but every conclusion that has been drawn on that information must be brought in to doubt. It means that even if man-made CO2 emissions are on the rise, it doesn't matter, because our collective contribution to the greenhouse effect is practically non-existant. And it means that since this information goes against the U.S. propaganda machine, and would work to make people less afraid, you will never hear about it in the news.
Don't take my word for it though: I recommend you read everything I've linked to in its entirety and think about it critically for yourself. Form your own opinions based on the information presented there. I'm not trying to force you to accept my view of things; that's what the government is doing. I'm trying to force you to think for yourself instead of accepting the propaganda you've been spoon-fed by people who are supposed to be knowledgable. I also recommend you check out ClimateAudit.org, the website of Steve McIntyre, who originally found and pointed out the calculation error to NASA. You should also bring as many people as you can to this page, so they too can read things they wouldn't otherwise be exposed to and draw their own conclusions.