Global Warming

Do I think there is a warming trend of the earth? Most certainly. Any of you who are about my age probably remember being taught in school about the cyclical nature of the earth's climate. We were taught that the earth had once been tropical and extremely hot followed by a period of extreme cold with glaciers far into the south. We were taught that the glaciers were receding and that the polar ice caps were melting due to the earths trend toward the next tropical era. So what is new? We where taught this back in the 1950's. It was taught to us as an unavoidable fact of nature that would repeat itself through many millennia. No one thought to blame it on any act of man because it was understood that it is in fact happening and had been since the last ice age.

Now though, there is a human trend to blame we humans for the natural phenomenon. There of course are those who accept this idea completely without any question and those who don't believe that anything man can do can harm our environment. I certainly do appreciate all that has been accomplished in improving our water and air quality after many years with pollutants being unceremoniously dumped. I give credit for much of the more responsible attitude toward our environment to the extreme tree huggers who have created a balance between the apposing extremes perpetrated by unrestrained industry with thought primarily on the bottom line. I am grateful to both extremes with the balance of an industrial nation and clean environment for which we will benefit greatly.

I suspect that it is human nature to want to find a human cause for global warming rather than to just accept it as an inevitable act of nature. To simply accept it would mean that we are in a sense accepting defeat. We know we can't fight nature so it is much easier to convince ourselves that this problem is man made, therefore allowing us to believe that we have the power fix it. If we convince ourselves that it is caused by man we can at least go to sleep at night knowing that we are doing all we can. It is not human nature to just give up and accept defeat so psychologically we must lay blame so we can feel good, knowing we are doing all we can to maintain the earth as we want it to be, not perhaps as nature dictates.

I do believe that on relatively small scale we do have the power to harm nature. Our impact on the health of our waterways and atmosphere are excellent examples of how we can most certainly disrupt nature. It is amazing how we continue, despite our knowledge of what we are doing, to pollute our rivers at levels that do affect wildlife. Even the safety salmon that we value commercially isn't enough incentive to use even more wisdom.

I do feel that the belief that global warming is caused by man could be, as indicated above, our inability to admit that our earth, as we have come to know it over a very short period of its existence, is simply trudging along on its natural phase between ice and tropical ages.

I have also considered that it was a great ploy to get people in mass to be interested in cleaning up our earth. Environmentalists have had a hard time getting the masses to join them in a serious thrust to be environmentally conscious. What could possibly be more effective than to convince people that the earth is heating up, the coastal areas will be flooded and we will be living in a climate too hot to sustain our preferred style of life. Convince people that we humans caused it and that we can fix it. It doesn't need to matter if it is happening anyway and that we didn't cause it and that we can't do a thing to stop it. Pretty brilliant actually if this was really a plan to make people more environmentally conscious. It doesn't change the fact that global warming is real but it has had the desired result of more attention being paid to environmental concerns.

I don't have any doubt that there is a global warming. Did we humans cause it? I doubt it even though we probably have minute and temporary impact. I applaud continued efforts at responsible management of our resources allowing us and generations to follow enjoy a clean healthy environment with a strong forward thinking industry even as the earth relentlessly marches toward the next tropical age.