A Last Post on the Debate

Today I read an article on global warming that talked about the debate going on between the two sides of whether global warming is mostly natural or mostly man made. The article takes both sides and tells about them in a mostly neutral way, which I really liked. So First of all I would like to tell about some interesting facts that I learned from this article that I didn't know about (which just goes to show that there is always more to learn). The first thing is that the earth's average temperature right now is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit (I had honestly not seen another one of my sources report this value, which is kind of surprising to me). The next piece of information that I found interesting, which adds great support to the natural side of the debate, is that between about 1945-1975, there was global cooling, not warming. I had previously thought that since the industrial revolution began over a century ago that temperature and continuously increased, but apparently, I was wrong. This means that even with all of the carbon dioxide emissions that were being added to the atmosphere, along with all the emissions that were already, there was some other force driving the temperature that was greater than the effects of the greenhouse gases. Now this article does not say what was the cause of the warming and cooling, but it does say that it could be because of natural process' such as changes in the sun's radiation.

Even with all of this evidence, there is still much debate going on amongst scientists about global warming. Some say that there is no way a natural force could change temperature as much as it has (which seems unlikely to me since the change is very small and I have seen much evidence for global warming being a natural process). Other's say that scientists are just blaming whatever is going on on humans. They said that in the cooling period of the 20th century, people kept proclaiming global cooling all over the place (which I have to assume is true since I was not alive then and have not seen anything against it), and now that they see a very slight change towards warming, they proclaim warming!


Also one last interesting fact from the articles is that the changing sizes of glaciers is unexplainable by scientists and goes against all models. If the models can not explain it, then either the models are just wrong completely, or there is some force (such as a natural force) that is affecting the temperature that we do not yet fully understand.

I found all of this information at CNN.com