New study fuels already hot global warming debate

The ongoing debate between factions of the scientific community is heating up once again after a large team of international experts released a study saying the arctic is warming despite a 2,000-year cooling trend.

The study is the first to look this far back, and does so by decade. The results show that four of the five warmest decades in the last 2,000 years were between 1950 and 2000.

The science goes something like this: The earth’s natural wobble has brought us 620,000 miles farther away from the sun in the last 2,000 years. This should have caused a cooling trend. Instead, the arctic is 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. The findings are based on lake sediment, tree rings and glacial ice.

“Scientists have known for a while that the current period of warming was preceded by a long-term cooling trend,” said Darrell Kaufman, the study’s lead author. “But our reconstruction quantifies the cooling with greater certainty than before.”

The other side of the debate is of course already challenging the results. Prison Planet, a Web site dedicated to debunking global warming, says this is just another attempt to promote the already-debunked “hockey stick” graph, which shows a long period of steady temperatures before a huge increase caused by the industrial era.

Scientist Fred Singer, an outspoken climate change critic, said the study doesn’t show the Medieval Warm Period, which supposedly had higher temperatures than the last 30 years. A New York Times blog quotes other skeptics of the new study.

Back to the other side of the coin, the Kaufman study published in Science magazine goes along with the recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warning of arctic ice that could vanish in the next 30 years.

So who should you believe? Both sides have science and scientists, and both sides argue with passion. Al Gore or Ian Plimer?

At some point, you just have to go with your gut. The important point here is that regardless of whether global warming is a myth, it’s still imperative to not risk our plant’s future. We need to put our earth back in balance to protect our health and our offspring.