Global warming studies and debates have sparked heated debates since the 1980s. Up to the mid to late 1980s, the topic had essentially been for scientists but in recent times, it has become a commonplace spilling into the political arena, media and to the public. The topic continues to drive greater emotions with proposers and opponents exchanging contrasting views. Recently the fact of global warming has even been termed groundless. This claims are however mare fiction with no scientific proofs.
Significant denial to the fact of global warming only started after 1988 when James Hansen’s 1988 did a research on Anthropogenic Global Warming. The unprecedented warming in the past few decades and the tremendous warming in the recent past led scientists into believing that the natural forcing cannot explain it but green house gases (GHGs) can. The work of Hansen and by several other scientists, which also reflected the fact that global-warming, was intensifying in the phase of increase in anthropogenic pollutants, necessitated steps to control the emissions. The formation of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) took place in 1988 followed by the United Nations Environmental Convention on Climate, which emerged in 1992. The most significant though was the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to minimize the release of CO2 and other Green House Gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. As Riley Dunlap and Peter Jacques illustrate the attacks on the fact of global warming mainly comes from the cooperate world especially the fossil fuel corporations due to the worries of the shortcomings the Kyoto Protocol would bring them.
After the Kyoto Protocol the claims that global warming fact is fraud have intensified and mostly being through environmental skepticism-, “This strategy challenges the scientific evidence for environmental problems and therefore the need for regulations to protect environmental quality (Jacques, 2006; Jacques, Dunlap, & Freeman, 2008)”. This has seen...