No doubt about it, the climate has been changing over the years. But then again it has always done that with or without man's intervention.
One of the poster children of global warming is the Polar Bear stranded on an ice floe. Thinning glaciers and pack ice are widely held to be testament to a rapidly warming global climate.
We have all grown up thinking the poles contain ice. But that wasn't always the case. Evidence shows that plant and animal life once flourished on now-desolate Antarctica. This was prior to the big "die off" or the Permo-Triassic extinction some 250 million years ago. In fact, for most of its life, Earth has been a warm place. For 500 out of the past 550 million or so years, the poles have been ice-free.
30 million years ago, the planet entered the Ice Age. 18,000 years ago polar ice reached a maximum and retreated. In the 1300s, the Atlantic pack ice once again advanced and ushered in what is known as the "Little Ice Age" which prevailed throughout the medieval times. Glacial ice expanded around the 1500s. Records of this age speak of harsh winters and torrential rains. Since the 1800s glacial ice has been retreating steadily.
Insofar as the poles still contain ice, we are still in an ice age albeit one that is relatively mild.
What this shows is that the earth does go through a cycle of warming and cooling. Man's role in this cycle, chronologically speaking, is only very recent. And whether he has a role at all is still hotly contested.
The question being asked now isn't so much whether climate change is man-made. Any assertion that earth's changing climate is purely man-made is too easy to debunk by pointing to findings that over the past several million years, the earth has been going through a natural cycle of warming or cooling.
The question should now be phrased in terms of, Is human intervention accelerating the rate of climate change?
But so what if climate change isn't man-made? So what if man isn't accelerating it? I don't see why people shouldn't be moving away from fossil or other polluting fuels for the medium to long term anyway. They are extremely harmful to us in a manner much more direct and immediate than changing the climate. Like, they are just plain harmful to our lungs!!! Breathe too much and you die.
Besides, for as long as we are overly dependent on fossil fuels, the Arabs will have the world by the balls. And given the events of the past few decades--the OPEC embargo of the 70's, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Iraq invasion, Al Qaeda and 9/11, spiraling fuel prices in 2008 that nearly plunged the world into chaos--that situation is far from ideal. When the world is overly dependent on a source of energy for which the largest reserves are sitting under a geopolitical powder keg, global chaos is just a spark away.
So stop burning dinosaurs and promote world peace!
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