Late last month, while waiting for a bus at the Aurora Transportation Center, I encountered my first, and, hopefully, my last, climate change denier. For no apparent reason other than to pass the time on a cold January afternoon, a young man shared with me his views on the weather. He claimed that, beginning next year, a new Ice Age would begin and that it would last for 350 to 450 years. He received this revelation from the website TruNews.com, which deals mostly in conspiracy theories from a Christian point of view. I said nothing because, frankly, I’ve never been a very good debater; instead, I let my pen do my talking for me.
Climate-change deniers equate weather with climate, and vice versa. Weather is a local phenomenon, whereas climate is a world-wide one; and, in point of fact, climate changes drive weather patterns. Both proceed at different rates of movement. Climate change is responsible for the severe weather conditions we humans have been experiencing all across the globe. For instance, the mid-North American continent was hit recently by an unusually strong Arctic blast; the deniers would claim that it was proof that climate-change is a hoax, even though we are in the middle of Winter. On the other hand, Australia, where it is Summer, is suffering from 120-degree temperatures. How does that figure into the hoax theory?
The fact of the matter is that the Earth has been warming, admittedly in fits and starts, for the past 15,000 years since the close of the last ice age. It will continue to warm until such time as climatic conditions are created to begin a cooling period, several thousand years from now. This warming/cooling phenomenon is simply another of Nature’s cycles, and there is little we can do about it.
At the heart of climatic change are the amount of solar energy entering Earth’s atmosphere and its distribution across the globe. Geologists have four likely explanations which affect change. The first involves changes in the energy output of the Sun, caused by sunspots and solar flares. The second involves changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, most notably a rise in carbon dioxide. The third involves changes in the Earth’s geography, such as continental drift, tectonic-plate movement, continental lift (mountain-building), and volcanic eruptions. And the fourth involves changes in the Earth’s geophysical properties, specifically the tilt of the Earth’s axis from the perpendicular, which causes our seasons, eccentricities of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun, and precession, the wobbling of the Earth upon its axis.
These are all natural factors. There is a fifth explanation, and it is definitely not natural. Since the dawn of industrialization, humans have been burning fossil fuels and spewing artificial chemical compounds into the atmosphere with abandon, all of which has produced a greenhouse effect. The Chas does not, however, subscribe to the notion that humans have caused climate change; rather, his view is that they have speeded up the rate of climate change by their reckless behavior.
Climate change is inevitable, because it is a part of Nature’s way of doing things. Nevertheless, we should halt the pollution on human-health grounds. The diseases/disorders of modern life, the names of which are hard to pronounce, are the results of the tens of thousands of artificial chemicals poisoning our planet and, in turn, us. The longer we delay, the worse the problem will be.
Just a thought.