Climate Change

The other day my neighbor told me there can’t be Global Warming; we had a cold snap last summer.

It shows what an unfortunate name Global Warming is; thankfully the scientists replaced it with Climate Change. What’s in a name? Well, if you call the phenomenon global warming, people like my neighbor think it should be getting warmer all the time, when in reality the warming is a trend, going up and down in the short run, but trending higher over the long run. In the midst of the rising atmospheric temperature can be a decade or more of a drop in average temperatures. What matters is that over the last hundred years the Earth’s atmospheric temperature has risen 1.3 degrees.

Now, 1.3 degrees doesn’t seem like much, but when you have meteorological dynamics in such fine balance it doesn’t take much to upset things. I’m sure we’re all aware of the rapid melting of glaciers, permafrost, polar ice caps, etc.

I am particularly worried about the thawing of the permafrost. This can potentially release huge amounts of methane--a greenhouse gas 10 times more potent than CO2. The melting ice, whether in glaciers or ice caps, is scary too as this reduces the amount of light colored ice to reflect heat back into space exposing darker ocean or rock to absorb even more heat melting more ice. When this happens things can get out of control fast.

Of course it doesn’t help my neighbor understand what’s going on when scientists working for big energy companies say that there is no such thing as Global Warming. Fortunately their corporate remarks are mitigated by tens of thousands of scientists, who are not paid to have an opinion, saying there most certainly is and here are the facts to prove it.