Global Warming is the hottest issue nowadays, with everyone from the left and right wings and everything in between seemingly willing to cuddle the premise of a warmer Earth through a man-made cause. Even high-profile celebrities have come into the fold of the green revolution, and driving a green car is now more chic than flaunting a Lexus. With all this the throng of supporters throwing themselves in the effort to cut down man-made CO2, you’d think that anyone who dares bat an eyelash at the possibility that the latter isn’t the cause for global warming would be scoffed at and ridiculed.
Yet that is just what a recent British documentary (in UK Channel 4) proposes, a noble attempt to speak out amidst a maddening mob of man-made CO2 bashers. It proposes that the current Global Warming trend is more of a political nature than an environmental one. As always, there are two sides to the story, and in this one, Margaret Thatcher started the whole Global Warming Revolution as it is. The man-made CO2 theory was originally propounded by a fringe scientist, and was immediately scoffed at by the scientific community. But due to the zeitgeist of that time, when Margaret Thatcher was facing problems of a massive coal strike in the country, a theory which declares coal as a renegade agent seems that much more appealing.
With a distrust in Middle East oil and in need of an alternative to coal, she pushed for nuclear energy on the premise that it is a cleaner source, and conveniently leaned on the CO2 theory in an effort to do away with coal. Funding to the tune of millions of pounds was poured into research which leaned toward the anti-CO2 slant, and the issue snowballed from the scientific community into the all-too-familiar grounds we know today.
The documentary also pointed out several flaws in Al Gore’s well-received movie “An Inconvenient Truth” which proposes that man-made CO2 has caused a rapid increase in temperature within the last fifty years or so since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The debunk effort maintains that periodic cycles of warming and cooling has been recurring for millennia, and that man’s contribution to the CO2 buildup is nothing compared to that emitted by plants, volcanoes, and decaying matter.
The efforts to cease Global Warming through man-made CO2 reduction have also suffered a backlash of a more urgent nature. In search of a ‘purer’ alternative to carbon fuels, ethanol is currently the pet fuel for environmentalists; ethanol is derived from grain, and a fifty-liter car tank requires two hundred kilos of corn’s worth of ethanol in order to run on a full belly. That’s more than enough to sustain a child for an entire year. The push for ethanol as an alternative fuel source has contributed to a grain shortage in importing countries, not to mention in the already famished ones. It appears that there is a Mr. Hyde lurking behind the Global Warming Revolution after all; if this ‘minor’ controversy isn’t addressed for its merits, the issue can escalate into a crisis of global proportions.
the issue on global warming is really politicized. but still we have to do our part in caring for our environment.
Comment by luk4biz — June 21, 2008 @ 2:21 am