Global Warming, Environmental Degradation and Pollution: What Are the Real Causes?

Having been involved with doing research for health and fitness columns for twenty-five years, it's been my experience that, maybe, one basic research program in a few thousand really addresses the actual cause of the disease or fitness injury issue.

If we use cancer as an example of a diagnosed cause of death, we find cancer was not the actual cause, because cancer does not cause cancer, something else does. The root cause, in this example, is lifestyle choices. Those lifestyle choices can be smoking, drinking, junk food, environmental pollution, or any number of things.

If the engine in our car quits and leaves us stranded, the reason for our inconvenience, our frustration and the expense, isn't the engine quitting, because the engine quitting didn't "cause" the engine to quit, something else did. Maybe we didn't have the fuel filter changed or ran the engine out of oil or got bad gas, etc.

If we're experiencing an electrical storm with lightning, thunder and heavy rain, and we have the TV on so we can watch the weather channel to get information and the TV blows up, the cause isn't the TV that caused the TV to blow up, it wasn't the weather channel, or maybe even the lightning. The cause may be that we didn't have a surge protector on the cord to the TV.

I use the above examples because most of us are more familiar with those illustrations than we are where the environment, global warming and pollution are concerned. We believe we are informed, but most of us only know what we've learned since those become major topics in the news and our lives. Most of the "learning" has been from the types of news information and research that's similar to the health information and research that leads us to believe that cancer is the root cause of death if cancer is involved.