So many questions!

Over spring break i have not had the chance to speak with anyone who disagrees with me.  However, one particular conversation has stuck in m mind for several years now.  When I was a senior in high school, a teacher of mine questioned the class and their views on the environmental issues that were so popular at the time.  I, to this day, am still unsure of his angle with this class.  Maybe, he just wanted us to think outside the box.  Maybe he actually believed what he said.  Perhaps, he wanted us to simply question authority.  I do not know.  But, the lesson has stayed with me ever since and has skewed my thoughts towards environmental scientists and the popular environmental issues everyone is talking about.

In this class, he asked us to look for proof in our science books that the whole in the ozone was an important catastrophic immediate problem and to also find proof that people were the cause of it.  He pointed to gas weights and said how the gasses scientists claim to have made the whole are simply too heavy to reach those altitudes and gave us a bunch of scientific arguments, none of which any of us understood, but this made me think about how scientists pushing the arguments my teacher was so against, could also say anything they wanted and have us believe them, as they were "scientists," and we were just students.  The teacher also went on to show how none of our books actually proved or even simply stated that humans were the direct problem and that several facts had been left out of them, such as how the whole gets larger and smaller during certain parts of the year, how there was a whole the same size before humans were around, how there is actually a thing as too much ozone, an so on.  His whole argument pointed to his belief that scientists were using us, filling our heads with worries so that they could keep making money.

I have struggled with his argument for a very long time now.  We tried arguing with him at first, but the more he told us about what we did not know, the more used and lied to I felt.  Not to mention, the ideas and final arguments he made made more sense than the graphs and scientific speeches in our books.  I, to this day, struggle with what I should think about the ozone. I cannot argue anyone on this, as I do not have certain facts either way.  I'm just trying to keep my mind open and formulate my own opinion.