MICHELLE JUERGEN | guest writer

What if the global warming threat was a fallacy?

There is no scientific consensus on global warming. The idea that all scientists agree that our planet is in for a catastrophic meltdown is a fallacy. But the media doesn’t cover the whole truth of the matter: there is also an opposing view.

News story after television program after documentary cover the terrors of global warming: the polar ice cap is melting, the atmosphere will soon be rendered unbreathable and the planet is being destroyed by its inhabitants.

In addition to this gloom-and-doom attitude, pressure is rising for families and companies to “go green” and spend exorbitant amounts of money to cut down on their so-called environmental pollution even though full scientific proof for this upheaval does not exist.

What the media tends not to cover is the other side: those who believe humans are not the sole cause of global warming and that excessive spending on green matters will not remedy the situation.

Though harder to find, much research exists to shows global warming is not as dire a problem it is made out to be. Those two words do not need the negative connotation given them, especially when there have always been many fluctuations in the earth’s temperature.

Ruth Lea, writer for the British online newspaper, the Telegraph, explored statistics in a 2006 article: average temperatures have picked up since the middle of the 19th century, but even over this geologically short period of time, there have been discernable temperature swings.

In the early seventies, there was forewarning of another ice age, talk of which died away when temperatures warmed up.

There are often many fad science hypes that are wrong and eventually dissipate—Y2K, the over-population panic, bird-flu and killer bees. Data is misinterpreted, blown out of proportion and given excessive media coverage resulting in important parts of said data is ignored or tossed aside.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization established to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, issues peer-reviewed reports every few years.

According to a 1996 Wall Street Journal article by Frederick Seitz, the IPCC report, “The Science of Climate Change 1995” was approved by the contributing scientists, but the actual published version revealed that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The new version omitted original agreed-upon statements that conveyed there was no clear evidence that climate change could be attributed to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases or anthropogenic (man-made) causes. The IPCC published the report without these vitalities, and an erroneous impression was given that all scientists agreed there was sufficient reason to worry about global warming.

Unnecessary guilt is then pushed on humanity to “go green” at every cost.

Atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT Richard Lindzen is a leading critic of the global warming scare. He argues that the hysteria around it is largely a financial scam. “Some years ago, when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, almost all the biological sciences then became cancer research. I don’t call that corruption, [but] I’m saying [scientists] orient [their] research so that it has better chance to get resources,” Lindzen said in a 2007 interview with the National Post.

High-profile figures-turned filmmakers such as Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio are cashing in on their respective films, An Inconvenient Truth and The 11th Hour, placing the blame on humans for their pronounced doomsday of our planet and perpetuating the notion that if you aren’t into environmentalism, you’re a villain.

Companies like ice cream franchise 21 Choices, along with many grocery stores are raising prices because they are using “green” materials, all the while persuading that it is worth it to spend the extra money because it helps save the environment. But there is not enough solid, agreed-upon evidence to prove global warming is a present and terrifying reality.

Therefore, people are essentially paying copious amounts of money for nothing. The media fuels the belief that there are pressures from all sides to ride the environmental train and jump on the green bandwagon. Actually, there is a side going the opposite direction that gets far less coverage, and it’s not in consensus with the media-perpetuated view that humans are damaging our planet.

If the vast majority of scientists do not endorse the theory that humans are destroying the planet, why is there so much coverage in the media stating otherwise?

“Virtually every natural disaster that occurs—from storms, to droughts, to floods, to wildfires, to disease outbreaks—gets pinned on global warming,” Ben Lieberman said in a 2007 National Review Online article. “The frightening coverage has clearly shaped public opinion. Surveys consistently show that a majority of Americans want their government to do something about warming.”

This coverage is biased. The media has a responsibility to present the truth, or at least both sides of a controversy. When children are coming home from school and bullying their parents to drive a hybrid, it is clear that one side of an issue is getting far too much play.

It is important to be resourceful with what our planet offers, but the facts presented have been misleading. There is no consensus that the planet is in dire peril. Science is about scepticism and taking a hard look at the facts.

Scientists critical of the global warming issue should not be portrayed as villains for doing their job and not accepting the scare at face value. There exists a strong opposition to the gloom-and-doom, but you shouldn’t have to look so hard to find it.