Wolf D. Fuhrig

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Global Warming: Fact Or Fiction?

“… global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” because “human activities have little or no impact on climate.” So said the chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK),

Patrick Michaels, a professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia agreed with Inhofe: “Observed global warming remains far below the amount predicted by computer models that served as the basis for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”

Washington’s American Policy Center, a free enterprise lobby, is even more certain: “There is no global warming. Period.”

Those rejecting the claims that global warming is a growing threat to mankind are, however, in the minority. All science academies of the G8 countries--the U.S., Japan, Germany, Russia, Britain, France, Italy, and Canada--agree with the findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that “most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities,” most prominently the emission of green house gases, such as carbon dioxide. Global warming may raise sea levels, change the amount and pattern of precipitation, increase floods, droughts, heat waves, reduce agricultural yields, and cause extinctions in plant and animal life.

The U.S. Department of Energy reported that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2003 were 13.4 percent higher than 1990 emission, an average annual increase of one percent. Eighty-three percent of emissions consisted of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, such as coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

A growing number of Congressmen take the warnings about global warming and its dire consequences very serious. Two Republican Senators, Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and two Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Susan Collins, went all the way to the Yukon Territory and Alaska’s Arctic Ocean coast to see first hand the impact of climatic changes on the land and the lives of the native population.

The Inupiat Eskimos at Point Barrow told the senators of the thawing of hitherto permanently frozen soil (permafrost), the disappearing sea ice, the erosion of the coast due to the rising waters, and the declining indigenous wildlife. In the Kenai Fjords National Park, the senators learned of the retreating glaciers, and in the Yukon Territory they observed how heat-stimulated beetle infestations are killing the spruce forests.

Mrs. Clinton found it “heartbreaking to see the devastation,” and Mr. Graham warned: “If you go to the native people and listen to their stories and walk away with any doubt that something’s going on, I just think you’re not listening.” Those who oppose legislative action to reverse global warming either choose to ignore the changes in the arctic regions, as does Senator Inhofe, or they deny that human actions can cause climate changes, or that humans can do anything about them.

President Bush has acknowledged that greenhouse gas emissions cause global warming, but he does not think it requires mandatory caps on polluting industries, as prescribed in the 189 countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol. Two years ago, Republican John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman tried to introduce mandatory emission standards for the United States but their proposal, the Climate Stewardship Act, failed to pass by a vote of 43 to 55. By now, however, 54 Senators are reported to favor action on pollution controls.

Discovery astronaut Eileen Collins verified the findings of environmental scientists from outer space: “Sometimes you can see how there is erosion, and you can see how there is deforestation. It's very widespread in some parts of the world. … The atmosphere almost looks like an eggshell on an egg, it's so very thin," she said. "We know that we don't have much air, we need to protect what we have."