EDITOR’S NOTE: Sometimes Evening Sun reporters just like to argue. This week, Tyler Murphy and Jeff Genung attended a screening of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” sponsored by the World Affairs Forum in Norwich. Although they generally agreed on the content of the film, for argument’s sake they’ve taken opposing viewpoints here ...

Global warming is fact. There is not a single credible university on the planet that disputes this. There is more doubt in the scientific community debating over evolution versus Adam and Eve than debate over global warming. Global warming is happening and man is the culprit. It is true the Earth warms and cools in natural patterns. The ten hottest years in human history have taken place in the last 14 years and 2005 was the hottest year ever known to man in the last several hundred. This again is indisputable fact. Another indisputable fact is the correlation between carbon dioxide and increasing temperature. The more CO2 we put in the air, the hotter it will get. Every time the Earth has ever warmed up, scientists measured CO2 in the air naturally occurring. CO2 absorbs the heat from our Earth as it tries to escape our planet. Normally this heat would dissipate in space. The CO2 in our atmosphere this very moment is almost three times higher than it has been recorded in 60,000 years and that only because we can only measure as far back as 60,000. Combine modern globalization causing the frantic industrialization of third world countries like China, India and Indonesia and the problem is about to exponentially explode and the repercussions may kill you and I, but if we are lucky if may only kill our children unless we stop denying the inconvenient truth. – TDM

Global warming may well be a scientific fact, but it’s one that’s being manipulated, and easily so, for political purposes. With all the rhetoric surrounding our society’s attitudes toward big business, it’s often hard to separate simple fact from dramatized fact. Global warming is cyclical; our planet has heated and cooled a number of times over the millennia. The fact that it’s worse in our era is a no-brainer; we live in a heavily industrialized world – and a world that has taken significant steps toward improving the environment over the past few decades. Political alarmists like your friend Mr. Gore make it seem like a Hollywood disaster is literally “The Day After Tomorrow.” It’s not. These things take eons to happen. Give the measures currently in place a chance to work before inciting widespread panic. – JMG