No scientific agreement on global warming

Somewhat farther back, on March 26, the NBC Sunday evening news reported on a poll of Americans’ views regarding global warming. The report made a point of the finding that most Americans don’t know that scientists agree on global warming. The York Sunday News article also stated that “there’s nearly unanimous agreement that global warming is caused largely by human activity,� which means that global warming is happening, people are causing it, and nearly everyone agrees about it. The article then says that there are only “a few dissenters� in the global warming issue, “such as ‘Jurassic Park’ author Michael Crichton.�

Well, the media are wrong. I find it disconcerting that the major media can say something like that, when it’s not true. Scientists are not, absolutely not in complete agreement on global warming.

Look it up yourself: Search “global warming� on the Internet. Millions of Web sites come up, but the first few are enough to show my point. Though a larger portion of the Web sites support the idea that global warming is happening, many Web sites are skeptical. And these sites don’t come from maniacs spouting off opinions. There are respectable scientists who don’t think global warming is a problem.

The eelgrass article in the “Baltimore Sun� mentioned the 1995 and 2001 conferences of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in which about 2,000 scientists agreed that global warming is a problem. In 1998, more than 17,000 scientists signed a petition against government action on global warming, stating that the evidence does not show a real problem. Clearly, not all scientists believe that global warming is a problem. If the numbers at the conferences indicate anything, proponents of global warming could be far outnumbered.

I’m not an expert on the science surrounding global warming. To me, atmospheric science is somewhat boring. Meteorology is pretty cool, but I like physics: black holes and particles and explosions (oh my). But from what I’ve seen, the evidence is against theories of major catastrophe caused by global warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have been increasing over the past century, but the temperature of the earth has oscillated up and down by an amount less than 1 degree Fahrenheit.

Read some of the Web sites that are skeptical about global warming. Here’s the site of the organization that held the 1998 petition: www.oism.org/pproject/s33p36.htm
A few months ago, I e-mailed Dr. Jay L. Wile, nuclear chemist and author of the science textbooks I use for school, and asked him about the NBC news report I mentioned before. This is what Dr. Wile said:

“Thousands of scientists have signed a statement specifically saying that global warming is not happening (the 1998 petition). This is because satellite data clearly show no warming trend for the earth’s atmosphere. In fact, every poll that has been taken on the subject shows that a minority of scientists believe in global warming. For example, the latest poll I can find was done in 1997. A survey of state climatologists in the U.S. found that 58 percent of the climatologists disagreed with then President Clinton’s assertion that ‘the overwhelming balance of evidence and scientific opinion is that it is no longer a theory, but now fact, that global warming is for real,’ while only 36 percent agreed with the assertion. Eighty-nine percent of the climatologists agreed that ‘current science is unable to isolate and measure variations in global temperatures caused only by man-made factors,’ and 61 percent said that the historical data do not indicate ‘that fluctuations in global temperatures are attributable to human influences such as burning fossil fuels.’�

Jake Mokris is a homeschooled student and member of the Teen Takeover staff.