The Many Faces of Global Warming

Global warming, or what many are politically correcting these days as “climate change,” possesses many faces, many sides, and many issues that retain to it. Take for example the recent email scandal of 2011, and most notably the email from Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Professor Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in the year 1999. In the email, he explains to Prof Mann that they should hide evidence of global cooling through the use of “Mike’s Nature trick,” virtually dissipating any data that suggests a decline as a means to withhold the truth from getting out into the public and to the media that global temperatures had indeed stopped rising. However, something faulty, besides direct manipulation, lies within this data. The year 1998 was the warmest on record at that time, and according to Prof Mann, the analysis of tree rings essentially provided him with the numbers to suggest a decline in temperatures, and although this correlation has proved to work well before, these days, it is simply not the case. The second email to cause controversy arrived ten years after 1999 in 2009 through Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, disclosing his angst with scientists’ overall inability to account for the lack of evidence behind the year 2008, and as to why exactly it remarkably was a “cold year.” However, he has gone on record to clarify his standpoints on the issue: "It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability." It’s puzzling what to believe at this point: the exposure of bogus data in its shorthand by propagandists or what people are actually experiencing first hand all along.

            China enjoys a great boost in industrialization just as more and more third world countries grasp the power of fossil fuels and various other forms of energy that have been continuously powering big countries for the past hundred years or so, indicatively the United States. However, the country’s prosperity, as indicated through the government’s publishing of the "Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change," will be greatly short-lived. Crops are dying, and many key rivers are quickly shrinking in size, releasing forms of both drought and floods across the nation. In Tibet, the Dalai Lama is known to have gone on record for admonishing the Chinese government and human activity across the globe for virtually participating in global climate change. “These tragedies are not natural disasters, they are human disasters. They are man-made tragedies.” Tibet, known for its beautiful and breathtaking mountains and snowcaps, is experiencing a change to its geographical face. Many of these snowcaps are melting, and most of the blame lies with her smog-ridden neighbor, China. As discussed in class, the air in compacted parts of china is so condensed with pollution that if one were to simply wipe their face, black soot would be found on the crevices of his/her hand. There’s too much at stake to belittle something as real and scary as global climate change. Best concluded by the Dalai Lama: “Destruction of your neighbour is destruction of yourself.  Don’t remain at a distance [from each other]. Meet. Listen. Develop a spirit of dialogue. Create a sense of caring for the wellbeing of others.”