Click here to read Jared Rader's article, “Global warming debate still going strong.”

I am not the first nor will I be the last to say how utterly disgusted I am with how misconstrued the global warming debate has become.

In this case however, The Oklahoma Daily did such an abysmal job of cloaking its own biased and uninformed opinion on the subject that it felt more like an opinion editorial rather than an actual “news” article.

How utterly embarrassing that the journalist attempted to portray “global warming” and “climate change” as identical issues, as if the two words are somehow interchangeable.

Let me address a couple of points.

Firstly, the headline of the article was “Global warming debate still going strong,” and its sub heading read: “As some scientists warn of coming changes, skeptics say issue is political.”

The Daily then goes on to display an enlarged quotation from Dr. Postawko, associate professor of meteorology, which reads: “The number of scientists that don’t believe the climate is changing is relatively small. In an effort to give equal legitimacy to both sides, the impression is that the science community is pretty split, but it’s really not”.

Dr. Postawko is right on one thing: the vast majority of scientists agree that the climate is changing.

It’s a slow, natural process which is constantly occurring on our planet. But that’s a nonissue. Hardly anyone is disputing this.

What people ARE disputing is whether the Earth is actually headed toward a significant climb in temperature in the next 100 years, and more importantly, is it man-made?

However, The Daily decided that more sinister tactics would be appropriate in order to make the “anti-global warming” crowd look like a tiny minority of non-professionals who are largely at odds with their superior scientifically-backed peers.

The article seems to present both sides, but between the cheap photograph of a five-year-old girl with her Greenpeace parents holding a sign saying “it’s my future,” and Dr. Postawko’s quote, it isn’t hard to see which way The Daily is leaning.

If you want to be mature about the global warming debate then stop trying to make skeptics of global warming, especially man-made global warming, look incompetent through the distortion of language.

Climatologists who are skeptical of man-made global warming should be applauded for their continued demand for adequate “hard science” to support such a hypothesis.

Policy decisions, which would regulate emissions, private consumption and affect every single American should not be based upon an often misused Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, unproven computer model predictions and a man who “invented the Internet.”

There are a large number of scientists and climatologists who believe that we indeed are experiencing global warming; however they argue that the reasons behind this are solar rather than man-made.

If one looks at the evidence available, one can observe that the Earth’s temperature has been steadily rising and declining in our recorded history, and not even over thousands of years, but centuries.

Seeing as how about 99 percent of our energy comes from the sun, it would make sense that solar cycles affect our climate.

However, this seems to remain largely unmentioned in the debate. That’s exactly why this debate has become political, because if the solar theory is true, what would the point of passing carbon legislation be?

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that The Daily, nor mass media in general, is very interested in all the facts. Nor are Greenpeace and the 350 activists.

If they really cared about the facts they would think twice before promoting such a drastic change in legislation, legislation which could effectively castrate our economy while still failing to prevent countries such as China and India from expanding their already massive economies.

Does anyone realistically believe that forcing people to pay carbon taxes and drive hybrids is going to help anything while our eastern competitors will be far surpassing us in carbon emissions before long?

And does anyone remember that we’re in a recession? Anyone?

I can promise that CO2 isn’t keeping India awake at night.

Instead it has more important issues at hand, like providing economic opportunities for the millions of its citizens who are still below the poverty line.

Tucker Cross

Letters junior