A Letter to a Climate Denier
by Uzma Issa
Dear Climate Denier,
You argue that climate change is nothing to worry about, that climate change isn’t exactly real. Here are 2 claims you made:
1. This recent winter was incredibly cold. How can you say global warming is happening?
2. The climate has fluctuated in the past, so whatever we are seeing is natural and has happened at other points in history.
Well, here is my response to each of those arguments.
Your argument is flawed due to a misunderstanding of climate. Weather and climate are two different things. Weather is constantly changing, it fluctuates throughout the day, week, and month, whereas the climate is more of a long-term forecast. We have seen the global temperature increase steadily for the past years. We know that CO2 is one of the major greenhouse gasses that is keeping the Earth warm, absorbing more of the solar radiation, not letting it reflect as much. So, one good measure of our recent temperature change is relative to CO2 in the atmosphere which we can note from the Keeling Curve, which we can see below. The CO2 is steadily increasing and has been for over 60 years. This correlates to the temperature rising. In fact, since 1980, the temperature has risen by .32 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Therefore, global warming is definitely happening, but maybe this recent winter for you just involved fluctuating weather conditions that made it colder than usual.
Yes, you are correct that there have been ice ages in the past and that in general, the climate has fluctuated in cycles. However, the change we are seeing recently is more extreme than we have seen in the past. When looking at evidence from the past, we can see that the temperature and concentration of CO2 has been fluctuating, but, we can also see that the recent change is drastic compared to the past. The featured graph below, also known as the “hockey stick” curve shows the temperature in the past 800 thousand years. We can see cycles, and some bumps and curves in the graph. However, they stay relatively steady. If you look at the very end of the graph, we can see the black line spike up incredibly in a short period of time. This is an unnatural change, not going at the pace of nature. The pre industrial concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was around 280ppm, and it is now 420ppm, which is higher than the CO2 concentration has been in at least 800,000 years. This shows that humans have been causing the increased CO2 in the atmosphere, which has resulted in our global warming.
