Kind of like shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
The climate on Planet Earth is changing without a doubt. Most people around the world tend to agree on that matter. Most people who live in the hotter and drier regions of the planet know the climate is warming.
In Australia for example, there is at least one community that has moved underground to escape the increasing heat. Some scientists have stated publicly there are areas of the world that in a few year's time will become uninhabitable. A number of areas in India have temperatures rising into the high Celsius 40 degrees and low Celsius 50 degrees on a consistent basis. For our American cousins, that works out to 104F to 115F and around 124F respectively.
The cause of global warming has settled into two camps. The first, claim climate change and a gradually warming planet is part of the planet's natural ebb and flow and is not caused by human activities. The other camp claims the gradually heating world climate; loss of glaciers and melting polar ice IS the result of human activities and point to the increased amount of CO2 gas in the earth's atmosphere as proof and the earth's 7 billion inhabitants as the cause.
Who is correct and why do they take their positions? Both parties present reams of data to support their positions, with the non-human caused side claiming the human-caused side is crying wolf. The question for many people is which side to believe? Which group has the most believable science to back up their position?
This is where doing your own homework comes into play. If you want to drill down to the facts, you have to avoid social media accounts and their often biased and nonsensical information. There are many good scientific publications both in magazine form at your local news agencies and books written by reputable writers with good credentials at book stores and your local library. Use the internet's verifiable sources to fact check. Keep in mind, science beats out pseudo-science every time and there are many charlatans and people with their own vested interest to provide information that on the surface looks real, but if you dig down, you may find the information provided is not the real thing.
Several good magazines come to mind including The Economist, National Geographic, Vanity Fair, Earth Magazine and Nature. Join a discussion group in your location. See what is happening to the environment in your area. How has it changed in the last dozen or so years? More flooding or more drought?
There are many people on both sides of the argument with vested interests. The transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is just heating up with both sides taking ever hardening positions. Interestingly enough, this is not unlike the discourse and debate that took place when the internal combustion engine began to gradually replace the horse. Up until the end of the 19th century, horse-drawn carriages and wagons were the everyday means of transportation. It took the internal combustion engine, both gasoline and diesel over 50 years to replace the horse in the delivery of goods, farming, public transport, and personal conveyance throughout the world. As historians have noted, you can't change the conditions of a system without damaging a lot of people, businesses, practices, and habits that go with such a change. Such will be the difficulties and the time frame that will occur if the world comes to an agreement to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Up until the internal combustion engine replaced the horse, pollution was in the form of tons of manure deposited on the streets and ground into muck and dust that attracted rats, mice, and flies. Dead horses often clogged city streets and speedy delivery wagons pulled by teams of horses on tight schedules adding menace to public streets.
A hundred years later, we have another pollution problem. CO2 created by hundreds of millions of fossil fuel burning cars, trucks, planes, ships and auxiliary engines are seen by the human-caused climate change group to be polluting the earth's atmosphere and affecting everyone and everything on the planet.
Comments