A student’s opinion on global warming as follows:

My hypothesis: Global warming is real; however, so is global cooling. Some areas will heat up dramatically and some will cool down exponentially.

There is a war going on among the scientific community and the political community about global warming. Most agree that there is global warming occurring. However, most do not realize that while some areas of the earth will warm exponentially, other areas will cool exponentially.

In fact, most of the global warming debate has been politicized to the point where the voting public does not get all the facts.

They’ve been told that the Arctic ice caps are melting and that the temperatures at the poles are the warmest on record. The increase in temperatures in the area around Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and the rest of the Arctic Circle seems to coincide with a shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (the PDO shifts every 30-40 years). The most recent shift of the PDO brought warmer currents to the Arctic Circle.

Now, I’m speculating here, but, in physics, when an object possessing fast-moving electrons rubs against an object with slower-moving electrons, the slower-moving electrons speed up, leading to a temperature increase, leading to the melting of ice caps. Furthermore, the temperatures near Greenland have fallen by 2.2 degrees Celsius over the past 20 years.

Those scientists that say that there has been no other time in the past where the temperature has not changed as much as the present are misled.

The Vostok Climate Records show that there was a period of time about 138,000 years ago where the temperature was higher than the present. Even 5,000 years ago, the climate records show temperature levels near today’s levels.

Since 1978 the planet is warming at .08 degree Celsius per decade. The Arctic is warming at a rate of 0.39 per decade. However, the Antarctic is cooling by 0.12 degree Celsius per decade.

The temperature of the continental U.S., with its increasing number of heat islands, is rising at a rate of .07 degree Celsius per decade.

Should the temperature continue to rise at .08 degree Celsius per decade, the global temperature would increase by .8 degree Celsius by the year 2100.

By the year 2000, with all the data climatologists have, the Earth’s temperature had increased by .6 degree Celsius. MIT Climatologist Richard Lindzen believes that global average temperatures in 20 years will in fact be lower than they are now.

Note the following is an approximation:

For every eight scientists, five believe in global warming while three do not.

For every eight people on the street, six believe in global warming, one does not, and the last is on the fence.

One of the main reasons that the ratio of people that believe in global warming to those that do not in the public is higher: the hurricane intensity during the 2005 hurricane season. Hurricanes Dennis, Emily, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma all convinced most of the American public that global warming increased the intensity of hurricanes due to warmer global temperatures, which led to warmer oceanic waters, which led to stronger hurricanes.

My major qualm with global warming is that politicians are taking the idea and running with crazy extrapolations that are improbable.

However, by reducing greenhouse emissions and other problems associated with global warming, we may reduce humankind’s impact on the earth, although slightly.

Many voters believe that the U.S. government should focus more on environmental problems. This will probably affect the 2008 presidential election, with Democrats leading Republicans in wanting to take more action on environmental problems.

If the U.S. ratifies the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions per year, many countries that haven’t would be pressured to sign. Maybe with a new president will come a new aggressive attack on environmental problems in the U.S. and around the world. After the War on Terror comes the War on Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

Daniel Ross

Georgia Institute of Technology

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

dross6 (at) mail.gatech.edu

Atlanta, Ga.

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