The Science Of Climate Change Explained Facts Evidence And Proof

The Science Of Climate Change Explained Facts Evidence And Proof – The science of climate change is much more complex and controversial than you might think. But the size of the topic, as well as the wide spread of information, can make it difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. Here, we have done our best to not only provide you with accurate scientific information, but also to explain how we know it.

Climate change is often presented as a prediction made by complex computer models. But the scientific basis of climate change is very broad, and the model is only one part of it (and, for what it’s worth, quite surprising).

The Science Of Climate Change Explained Facts Evidence And Proof

For more than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics behind why greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide cause warming. These gases make up only a small part of the atmosphere, but they greatly control the Earth’s climate by trapping some of the Earth’s heat before it escapes into the atmosphere. The polar effect is important: This is why planets far from the sun have water and life!

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However, during the Industrial Revolution, people started burning coal and other fuels from factories, electricity and electric motors, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Since then, human activity has been warming the earth.

We know it’s true thanks to a lot of evidence starting with temperature measurements taken from weather stations and ships starting in the mid-1800s. Later, scientists began tracking the earth’s temperature with satellites and looking for evidence of climate change in the geological record. Taken together, all of this information tells the same story: The world is warming.

The average global temperature has increased by 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1.2 degrees Celsius, since 1880, with the largest change occurring at the end of the 20th century. more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s. Extreme temperatures have also changed. In the United States of America

This temperature is unprecedented in recent geological history. The most famous equation, first published in 1998 and often referred to as the game’s graph, shows how the temperature remained constant for centuries (wood) before turning too high (iron). It is based on data from tree rings, ice sheets and other natural measurements. And the basic picture, which has endured decades of scrutiny by astronomers and others, shows that the Earth is hotter today than it has been for at least 1,000,000 years, and possibly much longer.

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In fact, surface warming hides the true rate of climate change, since the oceans absorbed 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Measurements collected over the past six decades by ocean expeditions and a network of floating instruments show that every part of the ocean is warming. According to one study, the oceans absorbed more heat between 1997 and 2015 than they did in the last 130 years.

We also know that climate change is happening because we see the effects everywhere. Plateaus and glaciers are shrinking as sea levels rise. Arctic sea ice is disappearing. In spring, the snow melts quickly and flowers bloom early. Animals move to higher and lower altitudes in order to find coolness. And droughts, floods and wildfires have all become more severe. The models predicted many of these changes, but observations show that they are coming to fruition.

There’s no denying that scientists love a good, old-fashioned debate. But when it comes to climate change, there is no dispute: Several studies have shown that more than 90 percent of the world’s climate scientists believe that the planet is warming and that humans are to blame. Many scientific organizations, from NASA to the International Astronomical Union, endorse this theory. That’s a surprising level of consensus given the diverse, competitive nature of science, where questions like what killed the dinosaurs are still hotly contested.

Scientific consensus on climate change began to emerge in the late 1980s, when the effects of human-induced warming began to mount on top of climate change. By 1991, two-thirds of the world’s climate scientists who surveyed the early consensus said they accepted the idea of ​​anthropogenic global warming. And in 1995, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a prominent environmental advocacy group that regularly reviews the state of science, concluded that “the balance of evidence shows that humans have subtle effects on the atmosphere ‘the world.’ Currently, more than 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change exists (as do 60 percent of the US population).

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So where did we get the idea that there is still a debate about climate change? Much of that has come from a messaging campaign by companies and politicians who oppose climate action. Many have pushed the narrative that scientists are undecided about climate change, even if that is misleading. Frank Luntz, a Republican consultant, explained why in an anonymous 2002 letter to conservative lawmakers: “If the public accepts that the science is settled, their views on global warming will change.” The consensus question is still being talked about today, and 97 percent has become something of a thunderbolt.

To reinforce the fallacy of scientific skepticism, some people have pointed to things like the Global Warming Petition Project, which called on the US government to reject the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the earliest international climate agreement. The proposal declared that climate change did not happen, and even if it did, it would not be harmful to humans. Since 1998, more than 30,000 people with science degrees have signed it. However, nearly 90 percent of them studied something other than Earth, climate science or environmental science, and the signatories included only 39 astronomers. Most were engineers, doctors, and others with training unrelated to atmospheric physics.

A few famous scientists continue to oppose scientific ideas. Some, like Willie Vuba, a researcher with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have ties to the oil industry. Others do not, but their claims are not supported by evidence. At least one skeptic, physicist Richard Muller, changed his mind after reviewing historical temperature data as part of the Berkeley Earth Project. His team’s findings strongly supported the results he had set out to investigate, and he came to the unequivocal conclusion that human activity is warming the planet. In 2012, he wrote in an Op-Ed: “Call me a skeptic.

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Mr. Luntz, a Republican pollster, has also changed his stance on climate change and now advises politicians on how to encourage climate action.

A final note on skepticism: Deniers often use it as evidence that the science of the universe is unsettled. However, in science, uncertainty does not mean lack of knowledge. Rather, it is a measure of how well something is known. When it comes to climate change, scientists are discovering a range of possible changes in temperature, precipitation and other extremes – which will largely depend on how quickly we reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But the skepticism does not undermine their belief that climate change is real and that humans are causing it.

Do we really have 150 years of climate data? How is that enough to tell us the centuries have changed?

Earth’s climate is changing. Some years are hot and some are cold, decades bring more hurricanes than others, some ancient droughts have lasted for the better part of a century. Air cycles have been active for thousands of years. How can scientists look at data collected over a relatively short period of time and conclude that humans are warming the world? The answer is that the material temperature data we have tells us a lot, but it’s not all we have to go on.

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The history dates back to the 1880s (and often before), when people began regularly measuring temperatures at weather stations and on ships as they traveled around the world’s oceans. This data shows the warming seen in the 20th century.

Some have questioned whether these records could be reduced, for example, by the fact that a disproportionate number of climates near cities, which tend to be warmer than the surrounding areas, have the so-called urban heat island effect. However, researchers often correct for these potential biases when reconstructing global warming. In addition, temperatures are supported by independent data such as satellite observations, which cover the entire globe, and other methods of measuring temperature change.

Much has also been made of dips and breaks that reflect the warming of the past 150 years. But this is only the result of climate change or other human activities that counteract the temporary warming. For example, in the mid-1900s, climate change and pollution from coal-fired power plants blocked global warming for decades. .

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