Guatemalan Orphans Don’t Cause Global Warming
That’s a relief!
It was a stroke of pure genius on my part. Using the capabilities of swivel.com, I would simultaneously tackle two of the hot-button issues of our time - immigration and global warming.
Thesis: That rising levels of immigration to the U.S. have exacerbated global warming.
It certainly sounds like a reasonable thesis. After all, immigrants are coming to our country from less industrialized nations. Once here, these immigrants have access to all kinds of harmful carbon producing products that they did not have back in their home country.
At the very least, the sheer number of immigrants entering the world’s most productive and industrial economy surely would raise the level of America’s carbon footprint.
I couldn’t believe no one had thought to link these two items before. I had visions of testifying in front of Congress, patiently instructing our nations leaders on how the immigration issue and global warming were inextricably linked.
I might even get to meet Matt Lauer!
It was at this point that my project hit a minor snag. The data didn’t match the theory, as you can clearly see from the above graph which show both the number of Guatemalan orphans coming to the U.S. and global temperatures.
Oh yeah, there was one other problem. The teal line tracks the average global temperature anomalies since 1990 and it is the orange line that tracks the number of Guatemalan orphans coming to this country.
As a global warming agnostic, I shouldn’t have been surprised that the trend in temperatures over the last 16 years is down. Despite my best efforts to resist, I had fallen victim to the media clamor about the coming climate Armageddon.
Sorry. I promise I’ll be more careful next time.
global warming, climate change, immigration, global temperature anomalies
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