Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Global Warming: Politics Over Science?

When a scientist is convinced by his own verifiable scientific data that global warming is real, will this finally mobilize the global community in formulating solutions? 

By: Ringo Bones 

The conservative Evangelical community in America – who has the significant political clout to make the US government somewhat reluctant to join the global community to formulate solutions to move away from coal and crude oil energy use – has always viewed for over a generation now that global warming and greenhouse gasses generated by fossil fuel burning industrial activity does not have a scientifically verifiable connection. With faulty scientific research largely funded by Washington D.C. based focus groups and lobbyists beholden to Big Oil and Dirty Coal based corporations, the conservative Americans even resorted to manipulating organized Christian dogma to discredit any scientific research and anyone pointing to the connection between carbon dioxide rise in our atmosphere and global warming during the Dubya Bush administration. Fortunately for us who believes in reasoned argument over demagoguery, even tenured research scientists beholden to Big Oil and Dirty Coal corporations had finally seen the light. 

A physicist from the University of California in Berkeley and author of Energy For Future Presidents by the name of Professor Richard Muller had finally seen the “scientifically verifiable light” of his results that global warming is caused by the industrialized world’s own greenhouse gas producing industrial activity. Prof. Muller used to be a tenured climate researcher of Charles Koch – a representative of the primarily conservative mouthpiece who will readily use Holy Bible based organized Christian doctrine demagoguery to achieve their own economic and political ends at the expense of our own environmental well being. Prof. Muller recently had a change of heart on his stance on global warming when his very own scientific results proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that human industrial activity that produces carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses is responsible for global warming. 

As with what former US Vice President Al Gore experienced during his An Inconvenient Truth documentary, Prof. Muller says that it was a shock to me how the carbon dioxide levels rise curve exactly fit – as in correlates – to the temperature rise exactly; As if all this warming over the last 250 years has been caused by carbon dioxide generated by human industrial activity. Muller also says that if current trends continue – as if we humans won’t take steps to move away from dirty coal and crude oil burning industrial activities – temperatures here on Earth will soon be higher than anything experienced by homo sapiens throughout history. Even though Muller has hopes that we can eventually transcend from the problems caused by global warming citing that we humans are an infinitely adaptive species, he also says that adaptation is disruptive and initially hurts – especially to the economically disadvantaged who will, unfortunately be the ones to experience the worst effects of coastal flooding due to sea level rise.