OPINION: Hello, I’m climate change! Formerly known as ‘global warming,’ formerly known as ‘global cooling’
What government agency makes decisions so weighty they may cost the U.S. economy over $2.5 trillion and over 300,000 jobs over the next 15 years?
What federal bureaucracy holds the power to potentially pull the plug on thousands of consumers at both the peak of summer’s heat and the depths of winter’s cold?
What civic body has the authority to shutter billion-dollar plants while admitting very little positive impact?
An innocuous-sounding body called the Environmental Protection Agency does.
Using manmade (anthropogenic) global warming to justify its actions, the EPA has in recent years set out to decrease emissions. They have sought to shutter power plants and coerce automakers to abide by increasingly stringent mile-per-gallon requirements.
Or at least, it used to. Enter Scott Pruitt, former attorney general of Oklahoma and new administrator of the EPA.
Pruitt made immediate waves when he announced that the EPA would be rolling back many of the policies of his predecessor, Gina McCarthy, shifting focus from combating climate change to keeping America’s air and water clean. This stirred up immediate controversy — how could the head of the EPA even indirectly question the “consensus” of climate change?
Don’t 97 percent of scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change?
Certain environmentalist groups are outraged that the head of the EPA would even dream of denying man-made global warming. They lean heavily on the claim that there is a “scientific consensus” on the matter, with 97 percent of scientists believing in anthropogenic climate change. If this is the case, anyone denying climate change is either a recalcitrant reactionary or a first-class buffoon.
However, the claim that 97 percent of scientists believe in man-made global warming is simply not true. The primary source of this statistic comes from a study by Australian scientist John Cook, though there are others. In Cook’s study, he and his team read over 11,000 abstracts from climate scientists, he found that 66.4 percent of scientists expressed no firm position on man-made global warming. Of the 33.6 percent who did express a firm position, 97 percent believed that man plays a significant role in climate change.
Somehow, this 97 percent of a third of scientists ballooned into 97 percent of all scientists across the globe. It could also be said just as easily that 66 percent of climate scientists have expressed no firm position on the matter.
However, many scientists, including one of our own professors, stridently disagree with the so-called “consensus.” Dr. Christopher Kobus is an associate professor of mechanical engineering here at Oakland University and specializes in alternative energy. He believes that man-made global warming is a “fraud.”
“Human activity is a small spec in the CO2 output cycle,” he stated in a special 2010 Senate minority report, “accounting for all of 2.33% of total CO2 output.”
Kobus is not alone in this opinion, with hundreds more scientists dissenting from the “consensus”.
A solution in search of a problem
At the end of the day, everyone agrees, because of the second law of thermodynamics, that the earth is generally getting warmer (funny note: in the ‘70s, the scare was about global cooling). The controversy is whether or not man is the primary cause of climate change.
While man is responsible for the world’s greatest problems, we aren’t responsible for climate change. Because of man’s failures and natural degeneracy, our world is irreparably broken. One day, it will be so hot it will literally burn up. We can’t stop this inevitable reality — we can only be ready to face that end.
Questions? Comments? Radical feelings in need of venting? Contact the author at [email protected].
Whitney Roemer • Apr 4, 2017 at 6:57 PM
Despite any belief, for or against man made climate change, the Earth is having serious problems. We are also reaching one of the largest mass extinctions on record. So what if people are pushing for green energy and less destructive forms of power. Do we enjoy sending millions of tons of plastics into the ocean or losing all of the rain forests and icebergs?
A sign of this warming is habitat loss and our pollutants don’t help.
We destroy every being that isn’t human and even are self destructive ourselves. Putting the environment as a higher priority isn’t pushing some liberal bill, its bettering our wildlife.
Wether you are an avid sportsman, hiker, stargazer, or even enjoy a stroll in the park, it effects us all.
I wouldn’t say that our planet is irreparably broken, perhaps at our rate of development and food consumption, yes. But we can turn it around.
People are a large cause, there is very little land untouched. Parking lost replaced forests, we can even see that on campus, pesticides are causing wetlands to go stagnate and water creatures to go through sexual mutations, and plastic and oils block out oxygen from our oceans and freshwater systems.
Earth doesn’t just do that all on its own. Its us.
Joe Kline • Apr 4, 2017 at 12:44 PM
Who cares what many scientists believe? We need only to pay attention to cosmetologists, and the number of them that believe in global warming, and that is more than half.
87% of Americans believe humans contribute to climate change (HP).
Once there is catastrophic human hardships due to climate change what will the non believers say than “O I guess we were wrong?” We must act now to slow down the effects humans have on the environment.
Oooo and why bring auto’s into the mix? 2/3 of the power output of an automobile is pure waste, we will as a society will wish we had done more to conserve when we had the opportunity.
Joe Carbon • Mar 29, 2017 at 2:14 PM
So if Dr. Kobus’ figures are accurate – natural CO2 = 97.64% / anthropogenic CO2 = 2.33%; and the current total CO2 level in earth’s atmosphere is approximately 400PPM then anthropogenic CO2 would equal approximately 9 PPM of earth’s atmosphere. Put another way man made CO2 makes up roughly .0009% of earth’s atmosphere!! And this .0009% of CO2 is our #1 problem and will destroy our civilization. Thanks Al & Barack for pushing this jive and pissing everyone off. Just what this world needs, more phony issues, more division.
Jerry A. Darsey • Mar 29, 2017 at 10:05 AM
This is one of the most promoted frauds perpetrated by liberals and their accomplices in the press. It all started in 2004 when “Blood and Gore” [David Blood and Al Gore] started a company [Generation Investment Management LLP] to sell carbon credits. To promote their company, they need to start a hoax that CO2 was causing the earth to heat up and catastrophic consequences would result if we didn’t dramatically reduce man made CO2. Gore produced a film in 2006 [An Inconvenient Truth]. The main premise of the film was to look at historical records for the last approximate 600,000 years that showed, according to Gore, that as CO2 rose, temperatures rose. However, a more through analysis of the data actually showed that first the temperatures rose then the CO2 levels in the atmosphere; exactly opposite of what Gore claimed. Also, according to numerous studies, man caused CO2 in the atmosphere accounts for only about 3.2% of the total CO2 which accounts for a total of 0.117% of the total greenhouse effect. Do you think any of this data, which has been published in the scientific literature, will ever see the light of day?