Myth: Humans are not causing global warming.
Fact: The scientific consensus on global warming is overwhelming.
Summary
There is no dispute about the basic facts of this issue: carbon
dioxide is a greenhouse gas; the world's automobiles and power plants pour
nearly 6 billion tons of it into the air every year; and there are countless
indications that the planet is warming. Perhaps the most revealing is the
fact that average temperatures have been gradually rising, and the ten
hottest years on record since the 1860s have occurred since 1973.
Argument
In his book, See, I Told You So, Rush Limbaugh misquoted
a Gallup poll, claiming that 53% of scientists do not believe that global
warming is taking place, 30 percent say they don't know, and only 17 percent
are "devotees of this dubious theory." (1) Unfortunately, this
is a gross misrepresentation the original poll, which actually found that
66 percent of all scientists agree that global warming has occurred, 10
percent disagree, and the rest are undecided. Rush apparently got his incorrect
numbers from a second hand source (either George Will or the National
Review) without bothering to confirm them. He has continued to use
these false figures despite the fact that Gallup has issued a rare written
correction: "Most scientists involved in research in this area do
believe human-induced global warming is occurring now." (2)
The scientific consensus that human greenhouse gases are contributing
to global warming is quickly growing unanimous. Even the top critics in
science have been won over. Thomas Karl -- who has been described as "the
darling of global warming skeptics," and whose doubts about global
warming have been quoted by conservatives the world over -- has even been
swayed by the evidence. One could hardly imagine a clearer warning than
the one he gave recently:
The chain of cause and effect here is so brutally simple that it is
difficult to see how the Global Climate Coalition can deny it. The fact
that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas is not in dispute. And the fact
that carbon dioxide is being poured into the atmosphere by hundreds of
millions of cars and hundreds of thousands of city power plants is also
not in dispute. In 1950, these sources poured 1.6 billion tons of carbon
into the air worldwide; by 1991, they were pumping about 6 billion tons
into the air. (5) And this has been accompanied by all the above signs
of a growing heat wave. It is a testimony to the greed of corporate special
interests that they would even try to rationalize these facts away.
The United States is by far the largest producer of carbon dioxide
in the world. It contributes 21 percent of all the greenhouse gases poured
into the atmosphere, ahead of the former Soviet Union, which comes in at
second place with 14 percent. To be sure, this is not a proud statistic
for capitalism -- at least in its more unregulated form.
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Endnotes:
1. Rush Limbaugh, See, I Told You So, (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1994), p. 180.
2. Steven Rendall, Jim Naureckas and Jeff Cohen, The Way Things
Aren't: Rush Limbaugh's Reign of Error (New York: The New Press, 1995),
p. 17.
3. Except where otherwise noted, all facts and quotes in this essay
are from Charles Petit's article, "New Hints of Global Warming,"
San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, April 17, 1995, pp. A1, A6.
4. "Ice Cubes for Penguins," Newsweek, April 3, 1995,
p. 56.
5. Thomas A. Boden, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, cited by Lester
Brown et al. (eds.), Vital Signs 1994 (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1994), p. 69.