Dear Science,
Is global warming real? I would love to assume it is, because
everybody I know claims it must be real and that the ice caps are
melting, etc. But after the whole controversy with the hockey-stick
graph and after having a look at some websites, I don’t know what to
believe anymore. Please help.
Confused Skeptic
Your unwillingness to simply accept global warming as true, just
because your friends believe it to be so, is impressive. This is the
starting impulse of any decent empirical mind. Science
is—at its very core—the testing of ideas with facts. The
idea here is a big one: human activities, particularly the release
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, causing deleterious
changes to the world climate and the health of the planet’s
biosphere.
The question is a fundamentally difficult one to answer. The
planetary climate contains a nearly indecipherable degree of
randomness and complexity—the present and future state a
product of geologic, solar, and previous patterns of climate, and the
effects of living things (human and nonhuman), among others. A run of
cold days, or even cooler years, does little to disprove (or prove) the
core idea: Humans are changing the climate in ways that are going to
hurt us.
What do we know? The atmosphere has measurably changed since the
advent of the industrial revolution. A variety of
heat-trapping gases are now in vastly higher concentrations than before
human activities began to impact the atmosphere. There are
well-described and proven ways that these gases can change how the
atmosphere interacts with the geology, the sun, and living things. For
example, we can already observe devastating changes in the
oceans. Much of the carbon dioxide released by the burning of
fossil fuels has dissolved into the seawater, becoming carbonic
acid—causing a measurable and worrisome drop of the pH of the
water off the Pacific Northwest coast. We’re already skittering close
to the pH at which shellfish, including the microscopic plankton that support the entire ocean ecosystem, will not be able to
survive.
Science can still think back to one of the more elegant studies on
the temperature effects of carbon emissions, using the grounding of
the all airplanes in the United States after 9/11 as a giant
experiment—determining that all those jet emissions keep
nighttime temperatures higher than they should be, proving one of the
theoretical consequences of climate change.
Climate change is real enough, with enough backing observations and
theory, to run with the assumption that it is most likely true—but probably more complex than we realize right now.
Science recommends the UNEP climate change website as a place to start
if you wish to fill your skeptical curiosity with more data and follow
the latest research on the subject.
Quizzically Yours,
Science
Send your science questions to dearscience@thestranger.com
What people fundamentally misunderstand is that by the time science gets around to supporting the conclusion that Anthropogenic Global Warming exists with reams of recorded data, that data will EXIST in our world, meaning we’ll already be experiencing the deleterious effects mentioned above.
The real problem with Global Warming, is that we have to rely on INDUCTION rather that DEDUCTION to a certain extent. Taking what we know now, we have to make reasonable conclusions about what it _might_ mean in order to ACT before we find out what it REALLY means.
We can make some reasoned conclusions now, based on what we know. Does it amount to an iron-clad proof of the connection between warming, ocean acidification, and anthropogenic GW gases? Nope. But if you want to stick around long enough to PROVE beyond a shadow of a doubt that we’re causing massive climatic upheaval, then you are by default choosing to live in a world of massive climatic upheaval, and the attendant consequences.
For once, we have to act BEFORE it’s a crisis.
I think Climate Change is real, but I don’t think it can be stopped. Even if every man, woman and child in the US did everything they possibly could to cut down greenhouse gas emmissions, the rest of the world will go on poluting as much as they possibly can. The problem is the unrestrained growth of the human population. As long as people continue to breed irresponsibly, the amount of greenhouse gasses will continue to increase every year, and nobody wants to talk about managing population growth by reducing the number of children being born.
So we’re fucked. But at least I get to live in a time of growth and prosperity. To hell with the next generation – I’ve got mine!
/sorry. had a bushy moment there. we’re still fucked, tho…
Climate change is real, but unfortunately it will not be solved. Instead, it will be pumped for $$$ with “cap & trade” laws that generate revenue-generating chits to be purchased.
Since climate change will only be used against the people most interested in preventing it, and since it will not be solved, it doesn’t therefore matter if it is real or not: the consequences will be the same either way.
So shut up an pay your new taxes, slave.
I’m not 100% sold on climate change as a man-made deal… I do not believe we are that powerful. I am for not poluting the earth, we should feel obligated to clean up after ourselves. I mean, c’mon, didn’t we learn that in, like, first grade. So, how do we make people behave?
We don’t.
It’s America. Home of the Brave and Free, not the tidy…
.. and there should not be laws to force us to clean up after ourselves.
Government laws are out of control. If people would worry about the things they CAN affect in their own neighborhoods, in their own cities, we’d have less of this nonsense.