The What's and Why's of Going Against the Grain

NOTE: This is not a research paper. It is a blog containing my thoughts. Nothing that I've said is to be taken as absolute. Most of this was written without consulting other sources at the time of writing. Information was taken from memory in most cases and so is not cited.

I work with a guy who was raised in a Christian home but departed from the faith as a teenager and has begun to slowly return to it, albeit a very different one than he left behind a few years ago. Like me, he is tired of religious ceremony and of the pomp and circumstance displayed by many in church, and of the hypocrisy that tends to run rampant through the lives of believers. However, unlike me, he takes a liberal, often extremely liberal, view of life whereas I am more conservative. One day while discussion the problems with "churches" and Christianity he asked me why Christians don't do more about global warming. I didn't know what to tell him then aside from mentioning that I had read that many Christians don't believe it is happening or else don't believe that it is as big a problem as it is made out to be by the media and politicians.

I still am no expert on global warming and the arguments for or against it. I do my part to combat it by making sure loads of laundry are bigger, doing dishes by hand instead of using the dishwasher, buying a car with better fuel economy instead of the beefed up fast one that I was looking at, using those new halogen light bulbs instead of the old incandescent ones, etc. I do all this, not because I believe humans are increasing the temperature of the globe, or altering climates to the point where mass extinctions are a given if we don't cut it out, but because it doesn't hurt anything or anyone to do it. To my knowledge, even the biggest alarmest can not imagine a circumstance where using less oil, water and electricity will cause irreparable damage to the earth, so I don't mind doing my part to be responsible with the resources I use.

The reason that I have not joined the green side and why I will not parade arrogantly around with a condescending T-shirt that says "Save the Earth You Idiot!" or something similar is probably much the same reason that I don't believe in evolution. That is, I feel the people arguing in favour of global warming have more to gain from it being true than those arguing against it have to gain from it not being true.

For example, Kyoto costs one trillion dollars a year for full implementation according to one article I read. Who gets that money? Chances are most of the money goes to scientists and engineers who try to come up with alternative energy resources and the machines that use them. Since 1990, and probably even earlier, global warming has been big business. Scientists have devoted their entire careers to studying the effects of a warmer globe. In order to get the funding necessary to continue their research they have to show that the globe is in fact warming. But many of these scientists are not climatologists, they are biologists who study the effects of a warmer climate on animals in a particular area of the world. That's great. I'm sure there are many good uses for such information. But when they speak about what caused the warming, they are speaking outside of their field of expertise, in other words as layman.

I once read that most scientists whose degree is in climateology are on the skeptics side of the debate. I have not done a thorough examination to see if this is true, but I have done some looking and it seems as though many climateologists are actually against this global warming alarmism that has taken control of the media. Many of them suggest that the warming of globe is a natural phenomenon that has happened many times before and will continue to happen as long as the earth goes on, and that it always has and always will be followed by a cooling period. In the seventies some were worried about global cooling, predicting that an ice age was imminent if something wasn't done. The following quote bears this out:

"It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species," wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.

I'm quite certain that many on the global warming side would say that the quote is taken out of context or that Lowell Ponte was an idiot, quack, fringe thinker, fundamentalist, etc. They may or may not be right. I don't know who he is except that he seems to have been a radio announcer and former roaming editor of Reader's Digest. To my knowledge he had no qulaifying credentials. The only reason that I quote him is that there must have been some reason for him to have said that. Take it how you will.

Lastly, I should say that I don't side with the alarmists because they act like bullies. Much the same way as evolutionists snub their noses at anyone who would question their beliefs, so too it seems that those who support global warming do it to those who are skeptical of it, even going so far as to call them 'deniers' thereby equating them to, or at least drawing comparisions to Holocaust deniers. This reason is of course very unscientific. Whether or not global warming is true is entirely independant of the attitudes of those who support it. But over the years I have come to mistrust those people. I've seen the way they can ignore facts and get away with it because most people agree with them and will never give ear to the opposition. I've seen the way science has become a popularity contest more than an intelligent inquiry into the way the world works. Unlike most, I've come to the conclusion that the small voice in the background is usually more trustworthy than the trumpet blower on the pedastal.

You don't have to agree with me. I already know most people don't and never will. I'm not concerned with convincing you otherwise, just explaining myself and in so doing learning a bit more about hwy I believe what I do because, until you've explained yourself, I don't see how you can really know what you believe.