Politics of Science - Global Essay

But global warming advocates and skeptics have both fallen afoul of scientific facts. The author of an Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore was forced to remove a slideshow from a presentation on global warming "after the Belgian research group that assembled the disaster data said he had misrepresented what was driving the upward trend. The group said a host of factors contributed to the trend with climate change possibly being one of them" (Revkin 2009). Conservative anti-global warming columnist George Will wrote a column that was attacked by the scientists whose research he used to prove the absence of climate change -- they said their data showed the area of the ice shrinking, not expanding, contrary to Will's statements in his column (Revkin 2009).

Reality tends to be more contradictory than slanted political platforms: "Some regions of Antarctica, particularly the peninsula that stretches toward South America, have warmed rapidly in recent years, contributing to the disintegration of ice shelves and accelerating the sliding of glaciers. But weather stations in other locations, including the one at the South Pole, have recorded a cooling trend. That ran counter to the forecasts of computer climate models, and global warming skeptics have pointed to Antarctica in questioning the reliability of the models" (Chang 2009).On one hand, climate change in the form of global warming is clearly occurring. But finding a singular cause for that change is difficult, and because change never occurs in a strictly linear fashion, there will always be doubters -- if not about warming, then about humanity's control over the temperature changes, or the destructive potential of that warming. Politics, to some degree, is often more easily debated than the complexities of science, even though science -- in theory -- should just be about nothing but the facts. The scientific facts rarely show one clear and unvarying cause for any long-term phenomena.

Works Cited

Chang, Kenneth. (2009, January 21). "Study finds new evidence of warming in Antarctica." The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/science/earth/22climate.html

FAQ." Greenpeace. March 19, 2009. http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets/faq

Global warming. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). December 20, 2007. March 19, 2009. http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recentcc.html

Revkin, Andrew. "In climate debate, exaggeration is a pitfall." February 2009. The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/science/earth/25hype.html.....