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Dispelling the Myths of Global Warming

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Global Warming: Serious Threat or Alarmism?

By Mark Martin
CBN News

CBN News -- (CBN News) – Will we see another record-breaking year of powerful storms?

It's a topic that has found itself in the middle of the heated global-warming debate.

Buildings leveled, massive flooding, people waiting on rooftops to be rescued -- all horrific reminders of a hurricane's fury.

Is global warming behind this?

Al Gore's new movie would lead you to believe so, and so would the covers of major magazines.

Our journey into the climate change debate takes us first to the Florida Keys, an area extremely vulnerable in hurricane season.

We caught up with Dr. Hal Wanless on a boat in Florida Bay. He is a professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami.

“Hurricane Andrew, which was a Category 5 storm here in south Florida in 1992, took these red mangroves and destroyed 80,000 acres of them,” Wanless said.

Wanless believes that global warming, or the warming of the Earth's climate by an increase in the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere -- mainly carbon dioxide -- is something that cannot be ignored. He said this is causing violent storms to be more abundant.

“It's going to put us in a climate situation,” Wanless warned, “a sea-level situation that is going to be catastrophic for humanity and the rest of life on Earth.”

The National Wildlife Federation organized our boat trip off the Florida Keys. CEO Larry Schweiger agrees that global warming can be blamed for more powerful hurricanes.

He said, “You can't put a tropical depression on water that's heated as much as we're heating our waters without spawning more intense storms. And I think we're seeing that. It's like putting hurricanes on steroids…We consider global warming to be the greatest threat that wildlife and humanity has ever faced, from an ecological standpoint.”

But critics aren’t buying it. They say that present warming trends are cyclical. They're pointing to just 30 years ago, in the 1970s, when many scientists were predicting a global cooling.

Dr. Cal Beisner, an evangelical Christian, is an associate professor of Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary. He is also the national spokesman for the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a coalition of theologians and scientists.

“The globe is always warming or cooling,” Beisner explained. “We are not in a stable climate, ever. And we happen at the moment to be in a warming cycle, but it's driven mostly by natural causes rather than by human-induced causes…The idea that it's going to be catastrophic in its consequences, I think, is not only not proven, I think it's extremely unlikely.”

Beisner added, “My reading of the scientific evidence as backed up, for instance, by Neil Frank, the former director of the U.S. National Hurricane Center, is that there is no statistically significant correlation between global average temperature and hurricane frequency or intensity.”

That is opposite the view of global warming held by another man who also calls himself an evangelical Christian -- the Reverend Dr. Jim Ball. Ball is the executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network.

“It's going to make droughts drier,” Ball said.” It's going to make floods fiercer, hurricanes harsher.”

He helped organize the signing of a document called The Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Ball said, “We came to the conclusion that it's a human-induced problem - people are causing it. [And] that the consequences are going to be profound and hit the poor the hardest…The Evangelical Climate Initiative statement says that we're basically convinced that there's enough scientific evidence to show that we should be addressing the problem.”

One of the most vocal critics of the seriousness of a human-induced global warming threat can be found at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Richard Lindzen is a professor of Atmospheric Science.

He said science is on his side to combat what he called "climate alarmism." "Essentially, the alarm is based on the notion that the Earth is very badly designed, and without man's intervention, we'd fall apart,” he said.

The MIT professor, who also taught at Harvard and is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, agrees that we are in a warming period, but nothing substantial.

“We've had on the order of a half-degree in a century…,” Lindzen said. “[I] always find it astonishing when people try to disguise this by saying this is a record-breaking year, when it's a hundredth-of- a-degree warmer, and the accuracy is only a few tenths of a degree.”

Lindzen said there is a tendency to oversell things to get funding, creating a political process that has gotten out of hand.

“By now, I think,” Lindzen said, “you have at least one political party that it is committed to one side of this issue and treating anyone who questions it as a flatterer ... or [as] a Holocaust denier, or who knows what.”

Regardless of the politics involved in the global warming debate, the fact remains that we are now in another hurricane season.

According to its Web site, NASA predicts a very active North Atlantic hurricane season, with 13 to 16 named storms. And if that holds true, the global warming debate could get even hotter.

The NASA Hurricane Resource Page

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