What’s the Truth about Global Warming

Are we warmer now then we were 30 years ago.  I always wondered what the truth was.

During the 1970’s both my husband and I remember being told we were heading for an ice age and that glaciers would be forming and creeping down from the far northern reaches into the Midwest.  The thought chilled me to the bone.  (That’s not hard to do.) 

Then I heard media favorite personalities saying they were purchasing carbon credits.  We did a little investigation on that and discovered carbon credits were just an excuse for someone to make money (wish we’d thought of it first) and for someone else to cover their excesses.  (There’s another word we could insert here, but I may get censored.)  You can live in a 40,000 square foot house and fly private jets burning up a lot of carbons and make up for it by paying for someone to plant a tree, but wait doesn’t it take a tree years go grow big enough to make a difference.  (Take that starlet who looks serious when she says, but I purchase carbon credits.)

We heard various stories like eating beef was bad because cows emitted a lot of methane.  (So do people.  At our house we call it making holes in the ozone layer).  If we eliminated cows from the world, we’d eliminate a lot of methane, which contributes to ozone depletion.  But then so does turkey (cause people to contribute to ozone depletion that is.)   I suspect that the vegans are behind this solution.  There’s another solution.  Let’s face it if we eliminate people we eliminate a source of methane, etc.   Well you get my drift.  It all seemed ludicrous to us and we were laughing about it way too much.

Let’s face it if people were really serious we’d eliminate cathedral ceilings in all of our buildings.  After all heat rises and who needs to heat the ceiling.  We could lower ceilings, lower heating bills and save the environment. 

Then a lot of our favorite radio personalities called global warming a bunch of bunk and cited experts who agreed with that.  Two articles I came across from columnists certainly made global warming look like a hoax.   One contended that 2007 was actually a year of global cooling.  It cited statistics from South Africa where snow fell for the first time in years and said people were dying in Peru from exposure to the coldest weather in years.  Crops failed, vineyards in New Zealand froze.  Made sense to me, but being a born skeptic I researched it and downloaded some data, including some from NASA.

With the aid of my husband (he is an engineer) to interpret the data I soldiered on.   According to hubby’s reading NASA says our global temperatures have risen less than 1 degree fahrenheit in the last 65 years.  (And, those are stats taken from international data.)  You can't blame that on man made pollution.  And, looking at the data I can see why they were afraid there was an ice age coming.  During the 70’s there was a dramatic drop in global temperatures.  In fact, what the stats show is there seem to be periods of colder and then warmer weather.  Almost like a cycle and it’s been like this for over 100 years. 

I’d  like to see us reduce our dependence on oil and reduce any possibility of man made pollution. The terrorists might have to fund themselves without petro dollars to do it.  Hugo Chavez and Osama Bin Laden might have to dip into their own reserves.  (No pun intended.)  And, wouldn't’t it be nice if some of the energy could come from burning waste products.  No more Mount Trashmores or unspent nuclear fuel.  We’d solve many problems all at once.

The jury is out, but I can dream can’t I.