Global Warming: Who Cares Who's At Fault? It's Here!
View From The Middle
By Charles Rogers

Thanks to warning after warning after warning, plus other publicity all over the place, plus "An Inconvenient Truth," last year's Acade-my Award-winning documentary film featuring former Vice President Al Gore, and thanks to a heavy meeting of more than 2,500 scientists, science enthusiasts and interested administrative individuals recently, the American public seems to be getting the idea that something might have to be done about global warming - and soon - if life is to continue on this planet.

And it doesn't matter whether we side with the scientists and others that believe we are responsible for global warming or those who say whatever might be attributed to civilized man is relatively tiny; minute; a drop in the bucket.

We can't deny that it's here. Those glaciers and icebergs up north are indeed getting smaller and slipping into the sea; and polar bears will be extinct and coastlines are disappearing and New Orleans is but the first of a whole slew of coastal cities that, sooner than we think or hope, will be erased; and arid deserts will become wider and drier and man will have to climb to higher grounds to build his home because the tsunamis will strike and dikes won't hold and earthquakes will be more frequent.

These scientists met in Belgium and discussed what the causes were (are) and came to a consensus conclusion that a percentage of it is manmade. Gore in his tome on the subject, said the same thing. The amount of carbon dioxide in the air is generally perceived to be the major culprit, contributing to the "greenhouse effect." Our pollutants are something we "must" control, they said.

Areas and countries and vast lands around the world will change radically if temperatures rise only a very few degrees above the averages we experienced in the 1980s and 1990s. Less than five degrees, they say.

There are those scientists who disagree, however - The Others - who contend that the whole global warming thing is coming about because it is the natural order of things. It's happening, but man has very little to do with it, if not nothing. That's what they're saying.

Now, the scientists and government planners and interested representatives didn't hold this recent Belgium meeting because of the imminence of global warming. They held it only because they hold these meeting once every five or six years - whenever they conscientiously feel the need to get together and discuss things scientific. The last time it was held - in 1998 - they also discussed the greenhouse effect, but, until recent discoveries, it was not considered crucial. Now it is, most of them say.

Except the others, of course.

Considered outcasts, those who would contradict the consensus were laughed at, although they too are scientists. They said the global warming trend has nothing to do with civilized human beings. Accord-ing to these also-learned persons, the concept is mostly the result of "natural variations." Some say it is due to normal changes in the sun's magnetic field. Others - quite logically - say that our planet has always cooled and warmed, in a manner of cycles, through millions of years.

No matter, at this point. It is incumbent upon us to do something about it. It will be interesting to see how this will set politically, what with the Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) syndrome smacking Congress in the eye when they realize they might have to have a wind-turbine farm in their back yard, blocking the view of a setting sun over the mesa. It's been said that Senator Ted Kennedy, whose Hyannis, Mass. homestead is on Cape Cod, is trying to swing legislation around the establishment of wind turbines off the coast of his island because it will absolutely ruin the view of the Atlantic Ocean from that vantage point, thus damaging the tourist trade. Curses!

But don't sit around feeling guilty because we smoked cigarettes and cigars or used too much hair

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spray or deodorant too many times and therefore it's our fault. Don't look back. That won't do us any good now. We'll change what we can. And if that doesn't work, we'll say we tried, and, from that point on, we will only attribute the rest of the existence of man2X - good or bad - to the natural order of things.