The theory of global warming affects UW students every day — professors lecture about it, the university launches initiative after initiative and the media discusses our eminent doom. Chances are most of us are participating, willingly or not, in some government plan to combat this deadly force. The need to sacrifice various aspects of our lifestyles to appease our green guilt continues its incremental march into every aspect of our lives. The majority of students never even give a second thought as to why they are being asked to sacrifice. For college-age students, this attitude of blind acceptance and sacrifice is what drives us to answer the environmentalist call to stop global warming. This may sound great if you can’t sleep at night for fear of carbon emissions, but for those who have ever had doubts about the sacrifices required to stop global warming, the time has come to consider the source of our unquestioning attitude.
Unless you are a scientific expert or have the massive amount of time required to keep up with the peer-reviewed journals, your most likely source of information is the media. For many, a very informative and influential media summary of global warming science was Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” The movie seems to justify an attitude of blind acceptance of global warming’s most dire predictions. The documentary states if we do not immediately make enormous changes and sacrifices, we will face droughts, killer storms, 20-meter sea level rises and the list goes on. The fact that the film won a Nobel Peace Prize seems to make it a credible building block for global warming attitudes.
One day before the Nobel Prize was issued, however, a British court declared “An Inconvenient Truth” was so factually inaccurate it violated England’s anti-propaganda laws, which protect children from political indoctrination. Citing overwhelming evidence presented by the prosecution, the judges ruled the film be removed from British schools unless it was revised or teachers informed their pupils of the misinformation. Despite the judges ruling the damage had already been done, millions of viewers around the world had seen the video and begun to form opinions based on false fears.
And this was precisely the effect Gore was hoping for. In an interview with Grist Magazine about his documentary, the former vice president stated, “I believe it’s appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous [Global Warming] is.” Gore thinks if Americans continue to deny the dangers of global warming when presented with facts, it is OK to scare them into compliance. So following the inaccurate assumptions given to us by Gore’s film and other media, we continue to make sacrifices and change our lives. Because of these baseless fears and assumptions, we never ask if our sacrifices are worth it.
In his March 2 article, “Passive terminology dulls the imminent threat of global climate change,” Anthony Cefali of the Daily Cardinal gives an argument which clearly demonstrates the blind acceptance of global warming propaganda. He states, “Under any name, global warming is occurring, and it is occurring at a rate we can no longer accurately model. Because our models have failed, we’re seeing things we couldn’t possibly predict, which accounts for cool weather anomalies amidst a planet awash in warming.” While I am not in a position to discuss the scientific accuracy of this statement, I want to address the attitude. This quote admits some temperatures have fallen, climate models are inaccurate, and we cannot predict what will happen to the environment. These are perfect grounds for throwing out the assumptions and conclusions of global warming theory or at least holding off on serious action. But because of blind acceptance and fear, Cefali concludes things must be so bad we can’t even understand! Cefali thinks we need a more scary term for global warming; he doesn’t realize many scientists prefer to use the term climate change because global warming is just an unproven theory.
It seems strange that global warming alarmists want us to make sacrifices based on exaggerations and fear if there are clear data supporting their claims. The reason people like Gore want us to stay in the dark is not because global warming is a false or far-flung idea. The reason is there is no scientific consensus regarding the existence of man made global warming, and the science that does suggest such an effect is not that scary. Not scary enough to warrant major lifestyle or economic changes, and definitely not scary enough to warrant attitudes of fear and blind acceptance.
Examine your life and the changes that are happening around you. Do you sacrifice or spend extra money for green products because you want to, or because you are forced or scared not to? Read some dissenting opinions, examine the science behind global warming, and ignore the “consensus” propaganda. You will find your fear will be replaced with a question. Why are we sacrificing so much for an unproved idea that poses only a minor threat?
Andrew Carpenter ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in communication arts and psychology.
