The Myth of Man-Made Global Warming

Lately global warming has come to the fore center of attention for many people and governments. All across the world people hear news of how “global warming needs to be stopped”, “humanity is ruining its future”, “our greenhouse gasses are slowing raising the temperature of the world”, and “how something needs to be done, by the people and governments of the world.” In recent years people have come to believe mankind as the cause of global warming in the world, however it can be argued, and is, that global warming is a natural process that mankind has little to no control over.

Under debate and controversial, the causes of global warming will usually vary from scientist to scientist, but a few main arguments exist. The main argument against man-made global warming revolves around the idea that, we simply do not have all the information necessary to successfully start predicting climate change on a worldwide level. Humanity has only been recording temperatures since 1850. Only 160 years of temperature taking out of the several billion years that the earth has had an actual climate. What’s more, the temperature measuring devices were not very accurate until about the mid-1900’s. That leaves only about 60 years of accurate scientific data. For the temperature data for the rest of the thousands of years of human civilization, scientists have used the painstaking method of utilizing ancient accounts from early man. Needless to say, ancient accounts of the temperature are not very precise, so scientists fill in with a lot guesswork based upon agricultural data, human records, tree-ring widths, coral growth, and isotope variations in ice cores. Now the question comes up; how can we say that the Earth’s climate has heated up over the past 60 years as a direct effect of mankind’s industry when we do not have the data to support this. For all that the data suggests the Earth could have been slowly heating up for the past million years without any help from humans.

Climate cycles, another argument against the idea of human caused global warming, states that the Earth’s climate changes in cycles. The Earth’s climate on its planetary timescale mainly consists of ice ages dotted with various warm periods, called interglacial periods. These cycles are evidenced in looking at ancient history. Qualitatively, the Earth's climate has varied between conditions that support large-scale continental glaciation and those which are extensively tropical and lack permanent ice caps even at the poles. The time scale for this variation is roughly 140 million years and may be related to Earth's motion into and out of galactic spiral arms. This means that about every 140 million years the climate shifts between hot and cold. But even in between the 140 million time intervals there are fluctuations in climatic temperatures. Several notable examples include the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. The Holocene Climatic Optimum occurred roughly 9,000 to 5,000 years before present time and resulted in increases in global temperatures by several degrees Celsius. During this period the North Pole experienced temperatures that were higher by four degrees Celsius, Siberia experienced winter warming of three to nine degrees Celsius and summer warming of two to six degrees Celsius, Northwestern Europe had warming by a few degrees Celsius, and it appears that the average temperature change declined with latitude, resulting in no average changes in temperature near the equator. The Medieval Warm Period occurred from the tenth century to the fourteenth century and was an extreme warming of many parts of the world. Ocean temperatures were about one degree Celsius higher than today and the seas were relatively ice-free. The Little Ice Age occurred in right after the Medieval Warm Period and lasted until the mid 19th century. In the North Atlantic, sediments accumulated since the end of the last ice age, nearly 12,000 years ago, show regular increases in the amount of coarse sediment grains deposited from icebergs melting in the now open ocean, indicating a series of one to two degrees Celsius cooling events recurring every 1,500 years or so. The most recent of these cooling events was the Little Ice Age. These same cooling events are detected in sediments accumulating off Africa, but the cooling events appear to be larger, ranging between three to eight degrees Celsius. All of these events help show that the Earth will cycle between climates on both the macro and micro scale.

Another argument for natural global warming comes from a little known natural phenomenon called solar variation. Solar variation, which deals with such factors as sunspots, results from the changes in the amount of solar radiation emitted by the sun and results in a change in global temperatures. Data suggests that whenever solar radiation spikes the Earth heats up and when it lowers the earth cools. Research indicates that the sun may have contributed to about 45–50 percent of the increase in the average global surface temperature over the period 1900–2000, and about 25–35 percent between 1980 and 2000.

Proponents of manmade global warming argue that there is a correlation between human industry, greenhouse gases, and global warming, with mankind's industry as the source of greenhouse gases; however most greenhouse gases actually come from natural sources. These natural greenhouse gases are actually the greatest cause of global warming. These proponents will also argue that human industry gives off billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide every year; however, when they take these statistics they leave out the absolutely most important contributor of global warming, water vapor. Water vapor contributes to about 95% of the warming across the globe. Without including water vapor, the statistics become greatly skewed. Without water vapor included in the statistics it would appear that mankind takes responsibility for a much of the greenhouse gases, but when one factors in water vapor mankind really only takes responsibility for about one percent of the total greenhouse gases. The other four percent of greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other miscellaneous gases. As one can see humanity’s supposedly “colossal” greenhouse gas production is greatly diminished in the face of correctly factored data.

Many question the causes of global warming and one can only hope that after reading this, the reader can safely draw the conclusion that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon that mankind cannot directly affect in any way, shape, or form. Global warming exists as a naturally cycling, climatic process; any attempt by humans to stop this process is a futile and wasted effort that has no effect.