The truth about global warming and the coming ice age

It is a fact that the globe upon which we live is warming.

". . . An ice age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place."

I read this prediction 48 years ago. When a sophomore in college and enrolled in an Expository Writing class, I wrote a research paper, part of which was based upon an article by a freelance writer, Betty Friedan. This was five years before she wrote The Feminine Mystique (1963). Her inquiry, "The Coming Ice Age," was published in Harper's Magazine in September of that year. The article stirred my imagination. Since I expected to live another 100 years, I kept the magazine as a reminder to look into it 50 years later. We're almost there.

Computer modeling was unheard of then so the prediction was based upon solid scientific research by a team of scientists headed by Maurice Ewing, director of the Lamont Geological Observatory and a theoretical geophysicist at Columbia University. Their results predicted that natural global warming would start within 100 years from then (1958) with rising ocean waters flooding most of our port cities. What a prophecy!

I emphasize this as a natural process not caused by human intervention. Yet social, political and even physical scientists today still do not tell the truth about the natural cause of these events. Global warming has been brewing for over 10,000 years. Yet the far left propaganda mill is very busy proclaiming that the cause is man made without even a hint that we are at the beginning of global warming that naturally precedes an ice age.

Based upon my inquiry some 48 years ago, I was not surprised to hear that the ice sheets on the North and South Poles have now started melting. A natural event or man made? Just the other day, the results of a four year study using high-tech tools was released by Peter A. Rona, a Rutgers University professor who led a team of scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and Stony Brook University in New York. Their findings include preliminary evidence that methane gas, which is dispersed under the ocean floor over millions of square miles, is escaping and contributing to global warming, a natural process.

Still, Al Gore and the visual and print media are replete with sensational stories about the melting glaciers, using this natural event as a cause célèbre for their insistence that, with little evidence, the "warming effect" is not caused by nature but by man's flatulence alone, i.e., the buildup of greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. This, in spite of Dr. Ewing's accurate predictions 48 years ago.

In their book, "The Golem: What You Should Know About Science," Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch point out that when scientific experiments are inconclusive, scientists often resort to alternative methods of arriving at conclusions. Thus, scientific truth is also subject to cultural limitations because scientists live and work within the ethos of their culture and time period. Hence this is the time to be wary of scientific and political conclusions that man is the cause of global warming or that high level nuclear waste can be safely stored forever or that they will leak in 10 years.

As with global warming and Yucca Mountain, when important social decisions are based upon science, the average citizen is forced to trust that these decisions are made by those who use science competently. But, when stakes are high, science, like statistics, is often used to support almost any conclusion including the creation of bad science to influence political decisions.

Unless we study the matter in detail and review all alternatives, we should not draw independent conclusions. Science is just too complex. Yet we, like the political scientists, still pick and choose which science to believe based upon our own non-scientific biases.

• Dan Mooney is a Carson City resident and frequent contributor to the Nevada Appeal's Opinion page.