Cycle A - Teacher as Researcher - JW

This is a subject that has perplexed me for quite some time now. As I was going through grade school and high school we were taught that global warming was occurring because of our human actions on the earth and the high level of carbon dioxide that was being released into the atmosphere. The message at that time was one of panic, “If we don’t do something quickly, our earth will be destroyed.” Then as I attended college, the panic seemed to die down. The media began to inform the public, that perhaps global warming was just a cycling of the earth’s temperature and didn’t have as much to do with humans as was previously thought. This seemed to place society at ease and instead of being proactive about the problem, society became content to ignore it. Now, in the past few years, we are once again getting conflicting information. The media has swung back to their original conclusion that global warming is human caused. Quite frankly, this has left me confused. I was interested in taking this class so that I could actually analyze some of the data myself. I recently watched the Discovery Channel series, “Planet Earth”. In the last segment of the series there were several scientists discussing the impact global warming is having on our earth, especially in the polar regions. I have read several newspaper and magazine articles on the subject that covered this topic. As of now, I have heard various claims supporting both sides of the debate, but have yet to see some data to back them up. I myself believe that humans have had an impact on global warming; to what degree I am not sure. I am looking forward to doing some data analysis and learning more on this subject from an objective viewpoint and not just from reading the media’s subjective opinions.