Obscuring the Reality Behind Global Climate Change - Essay Example

Unfortunately, lay people often do not have the context to analyze what they are being told by scientists. This can confuse, and much worse. Sometimes people even use this confusion to promote their own goals, politically or otherwise. This is what has happened with the current climate change debate. An objective look and scientific data show that climate change is happening, that, historically, a shifting climate rather than a stable climate is the norm on Earth, and there is a relationship between carbon in the atmosphere and global temperature – though there is also a great deal of complicating factors as well.

On the one hand, it would appear that it is very difficult to establish a historical trend of world temperatures – we have only been measuring and recording temperatures for around the past one hundred and fifty years – before that, we supposedly know very little. And on the surface this is true, we do not know exactly what temperature existed before the current period. But this belies the fact that there are excellent proxy measurements that are relatively accurate when calibrated to current temperatures.  We have ice-core samples that demonstrate how much snow has fallen in particular years, which can give a rough gauge of temperatures (National Research Council), as well as tree rings that show how well trees grew in a particular year (NRC). This data, when taken collectively and studied with a statistical and scientific eye, can give a relatively accurate approximation of temperature over the last two thousand years. This can be combined with historical records (good and bad harvests, for instance, or records of when lakes and rivers freeze and when they do not), to be extra sure that the calibration is accurate, which has been done by several scientists/historians (Edwards, 129). But this is something that lay people have a hard time understanding, which might cause some to doubt their findings.

These findings show that temperature fluctuation is the rule, not the exception. In the past thousand years, the earth has moved from what was known as “the Medieval Optimum”, a relatively warm period when crops grew especially well in Europe, into a “Little Ice Age” that straddled 1700 and has since moved into another warming phase (Colman, 6500). So, the fact is that the climate has always changed, and asking whether or not climate change is occurring is somewhat like asking whether or not evolution or extinction is happening – we have a historical record that indicates quite clearly that it is currently, and always have, and probably always will, occur.

This evidence is increased and modified by the abilities of modern scientists to take accurate measurements of world temperature. This ability was gained by scientists around 1850, and from that point, there is a fairly well-cataloged history of what the climate has done. So while climate change is currently happening, and presumably always will occur, it remains to ask whether we are at a point of significant climate change. All appropriate data point to the idea that there is currently a warming of the earth that is unprecedented in at least the past 2000 years, if not before. The world’s average temperature has increased year over year and decade over decade, predictably, for the entire time that data has been recorded using accurate thermometers (Linden, 138). That is to say, it is very rare to have a year that was cooler than the previous one, and one can all but guarantee that the first year of every decade will be appreciably warmer than the previous one. Furthermore, we have already surpassed the average temperature of the warmest time in the past two thousand years during the medieval optimum, which demonstrates that, on a historical timescale, the planet is exceptionally warm at the moment. Finally, the greenhouse effect is proven to occur: we know it, that is why Venus is so hot, for instance. So carbon emissions in the atmosphere do certainly play a role in the climate – exactly what role that is might be impossible to say, but we do know that it will have a warming impact.

It certainly appears from all scientific data that we are in a period of significant climate change. Note the word significant: though climate change is the norm throughout the history of the planet (and a good thing too, because it started as quite an inhospitable place), there is currently a period of exceptional climate change that is of note. Exactly the cause of this might be difficult to see for some and correlation is not causation, however, the fact that this growth of climate change corresponds quite well to the period in human history when we have put the most carbon into the atmosphere, with carbon being a known greenhouse agent, should give people some pause. There is a scientific consensus at the moment – something that has certainly been wrong before, but that should not be ignored. Climate change is happening and needs to be a part of any planning for the future.