Climate Change Evidence

For many people, global warming is primarily relevant to them in regards to the weather. They assume that when it is excessively hot, this is reflective of a shift in the global climate and when it is cold, this is a sign that global warming is not really as bad as it might be. However, this is far from the truth. While changes in weather may still be present during our era of global warming, climate refers to sustained and prolonged shifts in temperature.

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), although the earth has always experienced periods of cooling and warming, the current trend has a probability of a staggering 95% to have been generated by human intervention (“Climate Change”). The fact that the current change has been generated by human activity and intervention is what makes the shift so especially worrisome.

Industrialization since the nineteenth century has generated an explosion in the number of “heat trapping” gasses, most notably carbon dioxide, and “ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming” (“Climate Change”).

One of the most glaring examples of the manifestation of global warming has been the melting of the polar ice caps, which has been thought to have triggered a host of other, less subtle changes in the climate and lifestyle of both native and developed world populations.

As noted by Lonnie Thompson in the peer-reviewed journal The Behavior Analyst, “ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields” over the past thirty-five years have shown “ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low to middle latitudes.” There has been glacier shrinkage in areas as diverse as the Andes, Himalayas, and Mount Kilimanjaro (Thompson). In contrast to what critics allege, this shift is an unusual one.

Although sunspot activity has created changes in the climate in the past, increasing the heat generated from the sun, today, “We are seeing a temperature increase in the troposphere, the lower level of our atmosphere, and a temperature decrease in the stratosphere, the upper level,” which is the reverse of what would occur if sunspot activity were to blame (Thompson). The fact that global temperatures increase more at night than by day, scientists note, is also inconsistent with what would traditionally be expected with global warming (Thompson).

The scientific method suggests that after gathering all available evidence and forming a hypothesis, the hypothesis must be tested in the absence of other, potential variables which could affect results. Although this is not possible to do in a pure state of nature, scientists have used climate data from previous centuries to determine that current climate change is not reflective of warming patterns in the past (Thompson).

This suggests that the best available explanation is human-generated, rather than naturally-generated climate change since past explanations for variations such as sunspot activity are the reverse rather than adhere to current patterns. As well as the physical evidence of melting icecaps, shorter winters and more extreme weather events support the unusual nature of current warming patterns (Thompson). The greenhouse effect, it should be noted, despite its name, is a naturally-occurring phenomenon.

The issue is not that it exists but the ways in which patterns are manifesting themselves, suggesting that human rather than natural phenomenon is generating the activity and thus human intervention is needed to reverse what can be catastrophic and unpredictable results. We have, scientists say, have already exceeded the tipping point regarding the generation of fossil fuels and may have exceeded the level by which we can bring things back to a level of what would have been considered normal before the age of industrialization.

In fact, as also noted in The Behavior Analyst in 2011, “if we stopped emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tomorrow, temperatures would continue to rise for 20 to 30 years because of what is already in the atmosphere” (Thompson). Still, there is the possibility that the process can be somewhat contained. Mitigation is by far the most attractive option.

These include eliminating major, contributing factors such as better insulating homes to reduce the need for dependence on heat and cold-generating technology that generates greenhouse gasses, switching to energy-efficient cars and lightbulbs, and also taxing coal-fired power plants and using a federal carbon tax to discourage excessive driving (Thompson). Expanding the nation’s public transportation network can also be useful (Thompson).