Alright guys, it appears as though a lot of people think climate change is some huge “controversy”. It isn’t. According to a research paper published in IOPscience.org (IOP stands for Institute of Physics) titled Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024) which looked at 11,944 papers written about climate change. Of these papers only 0.7% of them rejected anthropogenic global warming. Of the papers that stated their position on AGW (32.6% in the first study, ~60% in the second) 97.1% stated that humans were the cause. And over time that agreement is only going up in percentages. 97.1% consensus is a huge amount in the scientific community, bested probably only by the consensus on the theory of gravity. In a smaller study performed by the PBL Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency 1,868 scientists were surveyed. Only 0.2% stated that humans don’t have an impact on climate change and only 0.4% denies that climate change exists at all. 66% say that humans contribute at least 50% to climate change. 19% chose not to take a side (http://www.pbl.nl/sites/default/files/cms/publicaties/pbl-2015-climate-science-survey-questions-and-responses_01731.pdf).
A popular argument I hear often is that man-made climate change isn’t real because the earth has always gone through periods of warming and cooling. This is true and is actually extremely well documented, dating back millions of years ago.
So Pangea was known to have broken up around 250 million years ago. That is what was suspected to have caused the continuous descent in temperature (having all the land in one spot facing the sun is going to warm things up a bit). Since then there have been nearly perfect cycles of hot and cold for each era. There are a couple anomalies in the chart that can be attributed to things like volcanoes, large asteroids, movement of tectonic plates, etc (those three can all lead to drastic cooling, volcanic explosions especially). Now to many this chart may be difficult to read, and even scientists struggled with it (especially since this chart specifically measures a few different variables given what information there is for that time period). Until that is, this guy Milankovitch came around. He was able to figure out through the Earth’s axis and orbit varies every ~20,000 years and the relationship between the axis and orbit (the angle) cycles every ~40,000 years. He has made the most accurate model created to explain the Earth’s cycle and it is pretty well accepted. It is something you may have even been taught about in high school. Now according to his model the angle of the Earth should be decreasing, which would mean the winters should be getting warmer (which we have seen with the past few mild winters). However, the summers should also be getting cooler, which they aren’t; if we zoom into the graph closer to current times that becomes more
apparent.Mid 1800s-early 1900s is when industrialization started around the globe. This led to an excess of CO2 in the atmosphere and is known widely as a greenhouse gas.
This graph is the very reason why we need to invest in green energy. It may not be as profitable as coal and oil, but what is a profit when we borrow this world from future generations? Who will be around to make a profit when pollution has gotten so bad we can no longer have clean drinking water or any semblance of agriculture and therefore no longer able to sustain the human population?
