I first encountered the strong case for global warming in the early
1970s in an Isaac Asimov science column. As an elementary school
student, I merely nodded my head, assumed that America’s political
leadership would address the danger, and moved on to an explanation of
quarks.
Even in those days, the subject was hardly new. The Asimov column had originally run in the late 1950s, before I was even born, and the possibility that burning fossil fuels might raise the Earth’s temperature via the “Greenhouse Effect” had already been around for many decades, going back to the late 19th century. Whether it occurred in the real world was a different matter.
My next encounter with climate change came in the mid-1970s. Suddenly all the magazines and newspapers were filled with stories that scientists had determined that the world was on the brink of a new Ice Age, with global cooling about to devastate our civilization. I still recall Newsweek’s famous cover depicting an American street scene blanketed by an arctic blizzard. Although I wondered at how quickly warming had switched to cooling, I was in junior high and assumed that our scientists—and the media that presented them—knew what they were talking about. Fortunately, no glaciers appeared, and the topic was soon forgotten.
By the late 1970s, I had joined high-school debate, and one year the topic was the environment, with climate-related issues being the biggest sub-topic. So I diligently gathered vast quantities of highly credible evidence from noted scientific experts proclaiming the certainty of global warming, global cooling, both, or neither, and lugged them around in my evidence boxes to all the tournaments. Random lot would determine whether I persuasively argued that CO2 emissions would fry us to a crisp or whether solar blockage from particulate emissions would freeze us to an icicle, or whether perhaps the two effects would perfectly cancel out. Since debate tournaments often had four rounds, I might alternate my claims of glaciers growing and glaciers melting every hour or so, always backing my position with copious evidence from expert sources. I reluctantly concluded that climatology was merely a pseudoscience, at least compared to my own field of theoretical physics, and I was glad when the debate topic switched to foreign policy the following year.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/two-cheers-for-heresy-on-global-warming/
Even in those days, the subject was hardly new. The Asimov column had originally run in the late 1950s, before I was even born, and the possibility that burning fossil fuels might raise the Earth’s temperature via the “Greenhouse Effect” had already been around for many decades, going back to the late 19th century. Whether it occurred in the real world was a different matter.
My next encounter with climate change came in the mid-1970s. Suddenly all the magazines and newspapers were filled with stories that scientists had determined that the world was on the brink of a new Ice Age, with global cooling about to devastate our civilization. I still recall Newsweek’s famous cover depicting an American street scene blanketed by an arctic blizzard. Although I wondered at how quickly warming had switched to cooling, I was in junior high and assumed that our scientists—and the media that presented them—knew what they were talking about. Fortunately, no glaciers appeared, and the topic was soon forgotten.
By the late 1970s, I had joined high-school debate, and one year the topic was the environment, with climate-related issues being the biggest sub-topic. So I diligently gathered vast quantities of highly credible evidence from noted scientific experts proclaiming the certainty of global warming, global cooling, both, or neither, and lugged them around in my evidence boxes to all the tournaments. Random lot would determine whether I persuasively argued that CO2 emissions would fry us to a crisp or whether solar blockage from particulate emissions would freeze us to an icicle, or whether perhaps the two effects would perfectly cancel out. Since debate tournaments often had four rounds, I might alternate my claims of glaciers growing and glaciers melting every hour or so, always backing my position with copious evidence from expert sources. I reluctantly concluded that climatology was merely a pseudoscience, at least compared to my own field of theoretical physics, and I was glad when the debate topic switched to foreign policy the following year.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/two-cheers-for-heresy-on-global-warming/
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