Here’s the thing about climate change: overall, there’s too much talk and not enough action. All sorts of people talk about this issue but very few people put their money where their mouths are to work on it and make it better. And you know it’s all just talk when it comes from celebrities, politicians (probably the most notorious for talking a big talk and not actually getting anything done, if we’re calling it what it is), essentially anyone not involved in making an impact on climate change.
Woooo I’m getting heated and it’s only the second paragraph.
Okay, we’re reeling it in, let’s talk about climate change.
The Facts
The reality is that the earth is warming up. It’s a scientific consensus, there is no denying it. In fact more than 97% of active climate scientists agree on this, and almost twenty different scientific associations around the world have come out with statements all backing the one I just made.
“Temperature data showing rapid warming in the past few decades, the latest data going up to 2018. According to NASA data, 2016 was the warmest year since 1880, continuing a long-term trend of rising global temperatures. The 10 warmest years in the 139-year record all have occurred since 2005, with the five warmest years being the five most recent years. Credit: NASA’s Earth Observatory”. https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
The earth is warming up.
Additionally, for millennia, the earth warmed and cooled in a nice pattern. We’ve all heard about the intermittent ice ages, and then the snow would melt away, then it would come back, in a neat little cycle. So, yes, people are correct when they say that the earth has been doing this warming-and-cooling thing for a long time.
Another fact: throughout those millennia of consistency, never did the CO2 levels on this planet exceed a specific threshold, about 300 parts/million. Which is great! It was consistent and appeared kind-of controlled. But in 1950, that threshold was broken. Not by a lot, but enough to notice for sure.
It didn’t stop. Not only have we long surpassed that threshold since 1950, there is no sign of it going back down anytime soon. THAT is a problem. Our consistency, our pattern, the way that our earth functioned and sustained life for millions of years has been thrown off by these crazy increased CO2 levels.
Why CO2?
People hear “CO2 levels are rising” and do not immediately associate that with global climate change. Just because there’s a little more of the molecule we exhale hanging out in the atmosphere, does that mean the worlds climate is being altered?
The answer is YES and here is why. CO2 has a tendency to hang around in the atmosphere. It can take up to 10,000 years for a given amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to break down. This isn’t good because CO2 is a “greenhouse gas”- I know, another buzz-phrase without a ton of background that people tend to either get nervous about or roll their eyes at.
A greenhouse gas traps heat. Light from the sun comes in and warms up the earth, and theoretically can sort of bounce back into space and not warm us up too much. But greenhouse gases treat the earth like a greenhouse- they cover the atmosphere up like a blanket and bounce the exiting sun rays right back at us, heating the earth up more than if those gases were not present.
So more CO2 means more sunlight bouncing back to us when it’s trying to escape, and more toasty weather here on Earth.
So… what happened in 1950?
Now I’d say we can agree that something happened around 1950 and it has continued to happen. CO2 levels are rising way more than they should be, and theoretically that makes the earth hotter than it ever has been before.
So, what’s been going on in the world since 1950 that might have made this impact?
For starters, we industrialized. Industrialization may have seen it’s start in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it really didn’t see a boom until the mid-20th century…right around 1950.
Right around industrializing, people started widely using cars at the release of the Ford Model T, which were cute little gas-guzzlers that people could afford to drive to work in industry.
In the ag world, between 1950 and 1997, half the farms in the US more than doubled in size. In the late 1950s US Secretary of Agriculture made the famous statement that, in order to keep up, farmers would need to “Get big or get out!”. Big ag was born, and along with it enough food to sustain growing populations around the country.
All these things are great advances of mankind, I cannot deny that. And I drive a car and I like hamburgers and I like having a job. BUT. It’s important that we admit that all of these things happening at once have a potential impact on our planet.
Big ag, specifically with cattle, creates immense amounts of methane that gets released into the atmosphere, and within about a decade it will break down into our old friend, CO2. Cars release CO2 directly from their gas pipes. Large factories release clouds of CO2 and believe-me-you-don’t-want-to-know-what-else on a daily basis into the atmosphere.
It’s About Us, and It’s Up to Us
All of these things were huge for the advancement of mankind, yes. They’ve given us the world that we know and love today, but let’s not forget: we’re relatively new here. Humans showed up on the scene of this planet a little less than a million years ago, and we just started playing with all these fun new toys like big ag, industry and cars less than a century ago.
People claim there’s no way for us to know exactly what kind of impact humans have on the planet, but if you look at it that way, there’s no way for us to know much of anything! And obviously we know a few things, I mean we invented cars in the last century and now 16-year-olds can drive them.
The way we’ve figured out things we weren’t sure about in the past has been through measurement. Through science. And if we continue to trust in our measurements, and science, it’s clear that the global climate is changing. Fast. And humans are absolutely the reason for it.
And coming up soon, we’ll talk about what we can do (according to science) to help mother earth out a little!
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