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Part 4
Read the following text for questions 21-29
Global Warming
Day after day we hear about how anthropogenic development is causing global warming.
According to
an increasingly vocal minority, however, we should be asking ourselves how
much of this is media hype cud how much is based on real evidence. It seems, as so often is
the ease, that it depends on which expert you listen to, or which statistics you study. Yes, It
is true that there is a mass of evidence to indicate that
the world is getting wanner, with
one of the world’s leading weather predictors stating that air temperatures have frown an
increase of just under half a degree Celsius since the beginning of the twentieth century.
And while this may not sound like anything worth losing sleep over, the international press
would have us believe that the consequences could be devastating. Other experts,
however, are of the opinion that what we are seeing is just part of a
natural upward and
downward swing flint has always been part of the cycle of global weather. An analysis of
the views of major meteorologists in the United States showed that less than 20% of them
believed that any change in temperature over the lust hundred years was our own fault –
the rest attributed it to natural cyclical changes.
There is, of course, no denying that we are still at a very early
stage in understanding
weather. The effects of such variables as rainfall,
cloud formation, the seas and oceans,
gases such as methane and ozone, or even solar energy are still not really understood, and
therefore the predictions that we make using them cannot always be relied on. Dr. James
Hansen, in 19BH, was predicting that the likely effects of global warming would be a raising
of world temperature which would have disastrous consequences for mankind: “a
strong
cause arid effect relationship between the current climate and human alteration of the at-
mosphere”. He has now gone on record as stating that using artificial models of climate as a
way of predicting change is all but impossible. In fact, he now believes that, rather than
getting hotter, our planet is getting greener as a result of the carbon dioxide
increase, with
the prospect of increasing vegetation In areas which in recent
history have been frozen
wastelands.
In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that as our computer-based weather models have
become more sophisticated, the predicted rises In temperature have been cut back. In
addition, if we Look at the much reported rise in global temperature over the last century, a
close analysis reveals that the lion’s share of that increase, almost three quarters in total,
occurred before man began to “poison” his world with industrial processes anti the accom-