It has been really hot these past few weeks. Some believe it is hot because the climate fluctuates throughout the year - hotter during the summer, colder during the winter.
However, many individuals believe the cause of this extreme heat we are experiencing can be summed up in two words: global warming.
One problem with the latter argument is global warming actually is not global at all. According to a study by Lubos Motl, a Harvard physicist, global warming is not affecting the whole world.
The study showed the southern hemisphere has been warming 0.05 degrees Celsius a decade since 1970. The physicist has stated the measuring station at the South Pole actually has shown a distinctive cooling trend in temperatures.
Even with that fact presented, many people who believe in the man-made myth that is global warming still argue the temperatures we are experiencing are all-time highs.
However, Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise and an acknowledged expert on Gore-bal warming legislation and regulation, does not believe the argument is quite accurate.
"Evidence suggests it is currently colder than it was during the well-established Medieval Warm Period," Horner said.
Even without air conditioned buildings, homes and cars, the peasants and knights during the Medieval Warm Period somehow dealt with the heat. Instead of crying "armageddon" to the entire world, they went out and made the best of it. Horner said this time was considered a golden age for agriculture, innovation and lifespan.
The earth has hardly been warming over the past years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced that over the span of the 20th century, the global average surface temperature increased about 0.6 degrees Celsius.
Sometimes a few facts are not enough to sway a global warming fanatic. People still will argue in support of the global-warming theory by saying the glaciers are melting.
Here's a question: what happens when you leave an ice cube out on your counter? It melts. Ice tends to melt when it is in an environment above freezing. To say an ice glacier is melting is not an eye opening, jaw-dropping discovery. Rather, it is merely a guess.
It is not a good guess, either. While some glaciers have been melting, scientists have proven other glaciers are growing (a process known as calving), Horner said.
So if the melting of a glacier is proof of global warming, then the calving of another must be proof of a global cooling . Always forgotten by the eco-freaks is back in the 1970s, environmentalists were running around telling everyone to prepare for global cooling. In the April 28, 1975, issue of Newsweek magazine, an article ran giving a scientific analysis of the then-impending disaster of global cooling, complete with weather patterns and a chart of the "average temperature change."
The article hypothesized this global catastrophe would create a shorter summer growing season which would then lead to worldwide starvation.
That obviously did not occur.
Do not let the global warming fanatics try to convince you otherwise.
Chuck Armstrong is a senior in electronic media production. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.
