[Note: I attempted to submit this response to my campus newspaper, The Crimson White. It was, obviously, rejected]

When it comes to global warming, don't believe the hype.

Superstition and despotism - western political culture is imbued with a history of rising out of these perfidies. The thought that our actions - rain dances, virgins thrown into volcanoes, our perceived immorality - mitigates or brings on the ravages of nature is an old one, and it is a thought that the scientific process has time after time shown false. The fear that accompanies these superstitions has been a tool of despots for just as long - fear of diving punishment has led to obedience and subservience to "God Kings" and to the divine right rulers. H.L. Mencken once summed up this world view: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." Today, we are confronted in many ways - all of them which feel to the great body of normal people with normal lives (those who are not perennially indignant activists and/or glossy eyed zealots) less than immediate and in many cases quite abstract and sophistical - by these examples of mysticism and tyranny. One of these such monsters is the specter of anthropogenic global warming, the largest in a long stream of hobgoblins for which we the peons, rubes, and knuckle-draggers are ultimately blamed.

Fortunately for mankind, but unfortunately for Jay Hodgson - author of the recent opinion in the CW, "The melting snows of Kilimanjaro" - the activists and sign-wavers whose self-esteem and federal grant money depend on milking fear for all it is worth, we as a people do not have much other than smog and wallet-lightening to fear from driving around our fossil fuel powered cars. This viewpoint - held by many well respected physicists, oceanologists, and meteorologists in the academia and public service - however, is dismissed by those eager to wallop the nasty, mean corporations in the name of the environment (and virtually everything else) as illegitimate from the start since "there is no doubt" and "the scientific community is actually near 100 percent agreement." Dissent from the environmentalist line is shunned because disagreement with "the experts" and with a majority of informed and uninformed citizens is somehow dangerous. Those who disagree with the proposition that man is mostly or at all the cause of global warming are routinely described by both the activists and the press as "deniers" - somehow linking those who question the misinterpretations, distortions, and outright fabrications of such groups as the IPCC to Holocaust deniers.

Anthropogenic global warming skeptics and indeed all people have good reason to doubt claims such as those made in Al Gore's ironically named documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. The very IPCC graph that Al Gore displays, showing a correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperatures, casts doubt on the propositions behind Gore's pronouncements. One must show contingency to breach the boundary between correlation and causation. In simple terms: if X and Y always occur together, X can only cause Y if X comes before Y. Luckily, the data shows such a contingency, but unluckily for the scare-mongers the causation is in reverse of what they state. Global CO2 spikes after a rise in global temperatures, in time variations typically between 200 and 800 years. Oceans cover 71 percent of the earth, with an average depth of 3,700 meters. One cubed meter corresponds with 1000 kg of water. It thus takes eras for entire oceans to undergo significant changes in temperatures. Along the same logic, it would take several hundred years for even the upper ocean to consistently change temperature. When this happens, though, carbon dioxide that was absorbed by the ocean is released into the atmosphere (the ocean, for the uninformed, is the source of the vast majority of atmospheric carbon dioxide in particular and greenhouse gases in general), explaining the centuries long gap between rises in global temperatures and rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide. In order to turn the causation the other way, though, "climatologists" base their computer models off of false data: they factor in amounts of current and future carbon dioxide that are many times more than actual current levels and most predicted increases.

In fact, much of the climatologists' energy is directed into the creation of various computer models in an attempt to predict future climate: these are the basis of most of the media hysteria that we hear on a constant basis. The very fact that these models are constantly being updated and revised - with the models of even past IPPC panels being obsolete - calls their entire legitimacy into question: the earth's climate is filled with literally millions of possible confounds dating back to times where our estimates of conditions are little more than intelligent sounding guesses. It should come as no surprise then that climate model after climate model has failed the most simple test of validity: the ability to predict present conditions based off of previously discovered and solid historical data. The very climate model used by the 1995 IPPC report to generate the now well known and scary looking "hockey stick" graph showing a future exponential rise in temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide has been shown to generate that same graphical pattern no matter what data was entered into it. The climate is simply too vast and too complex to take into account all possible confounds, and this guarantees failure if one's basic premise is flawed or if one refuses to take into account such a possibility.This makes very much sense if one considers a basic proposition: if meteorologists are wrong to alarming degrees about weather months, weeks, even days off, how in the world can we expect an accurate prediction of conditions in years to come?

Fortunately, there is something quantifiable that, regardless of other conditions, correlates even closer than CO2 with global temperatures: solar radiation. During periods of intense solar activity (as measured now and in the past by frequency of sun-spots, and additionally in the present with various technologies), the world has heated. During periods of solar radiation decline, Earth has been plagued with "mini Ice Ages." During one such high period of solar activity known as the Medieval Warm Period, Norsemen farmed Greenland and vineyards thrived in even northern England. During a large period of low solar activity, the Rivers Thames and Delaware went so far as to freeze - a very uncommon occurrence. We have recently discovered that the Martian Polar Ice Caps - indeed the whole of Mars - in addition to other planets in our Solar System (key word: Solar) have been warming for quite some time: specifically, since the 1970s, when Earth came out of a 30 year cooling period (replete with hysteria about "Global Cooling" and an impending ice age).

In human history, global temperatures, atmospheric CO2, and the rate change of both have been higher than we have seen of late. And throughout history, such phenomena have acted independently of human action. This makes nothing but sense when one considers that atmospheric carbon dioxide makes up around a paltry two percent of all greenhouse gas. The overwhelming volume of greenhouse gas is made up of water vapor at 95 percent. Water vapor is 270 times more efficient at heat absorption than carbon dioxide (and the vast majority of carbon dioxide is generated by - guess what - natural causes). Given that the past is replete with climes much more rich in CO2 and solar radiation, we must ask the question: What sport utility vehicles were the Normans, Mongols, and Teutons driving to cause all of that 14th century mugginess? And who was that brave and ingenious cro magnon soul who saved mankind from the Ice Age by churning exhaust from this Suburban into the atmosphere?

For the sake of brevity, I will now delve right into the juicy parts of opinion writing: political accusations. Why has this hysteria become such a driving force in politics, and why does it seem that those whose general political philosophy call for ever powerful government (the Left in general and McCain types on the Right) have such a monopoly on this flabbergastingly insipid issue. The answer, dear Watson, is power pure and simple. The activist Left has for generations attempted to make normal Americans feel guilty about their own personal success, telling them that by feeding their families and maybe, just maybe, saving up enough money for a nice vacation and a car big enough to take the kids to soccer that average Americans are living off of the backs of variously defined workers (as opposed to the end-game of socialist states, where only Party apparatchiks and the secret police - in Britain, the CCTV watchers et al - live off workers backs, and the workers live off stale bread). Politicians and bureaucrats are ever desperate to justify their existence and feel important at all of the right Washington cocktail parties. What better way to accomplish these ends than to tell citizens that their own enjoyment of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is dooming us all to Biblical events of the sort predicted by Gore and the writers of Day After Tomorrow. People who dare point out that a given proposal to arrest global warming is unwise, untenable, unconstitutional, or downright un-American and authoritarian can be brushed aside by claiming the most dire of dire emergencies: global catastrophe on a grand scale. Or, in the words of Benito Mussolini: "We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become." The environmentalists think that humans are too impudent and childish to be left to their own devices and property - we humans apparently make a sufficient muck of things that only the elite brains of those who care are fit to rectify the situation. On behalf of those in the public who express considerable doubt about the theories lumped on us by the sophists and calculators of the hopefully-ruling class, I would like to say to Mr. Hodgson, the author of the small violin sad song story about Kilimanjaro: stop trying to throw us into the volcano like so many virgins in the vain hope that Pele will spare us his wrath. The Earth will do what it wants, when it wants, and we are only along for the ride. Free citizens don't need some cabal of busy-bodies poking around in their affairs, and fie upon those who would attempt to use this blown up (and, many would say, made up) concern of "catastrophic climate change" to get Americans to give up even more of their freedom.