Thoughts on climate change/global warming
There has been a lot in the news recently about the climate and the Paris agreement, so I thought I would try to leave the politics out of it and just find some facts! Now I am not a climate denier, I think the climate changes a lot. I think that people have something to do with it. You can’t put more and more people on the same piece of dirt and not have changes. So I started out at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website.
NOAA claims to have been keeping track of the weather since 1880 to the present — 137 years of weather record keeping. I was impressed by that, just think 137 years of accurate, reliable, record keeping! Then I had to stop and think. This was before the first gasoline-powered car was made. Way before airplanes, and about eight decades before the first satellite was shot into orbit. So I had to raise an eyebrow when I thought of the winter of 1880, in Alaska, going outside to read a thermometer, and how accurate that might be, made me pause. But I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. So fact one is that NOAA has been keeping weather records for 137 years. How accurate and reliable those early readings were are up for debate.
I heard a lot on TV and saw a lot of print material that 2016 was the hottest year on record. But it was hard to find how much hotter it was then, say, 2015 the prior year. Then I found it, (are you sitting down?), it was 0.07 degrees F. That’s right folks, seven hundredths of one degree warmer than the prior year! That’s fact two. But that does not take into any account of the margin of error. After doing a lot of searching I found that NOAA’s margin of error is 0.14, that’s 14 hundredths of one degree, which is pretty good, but in this case the margin of error is twice the amount they said the earth warmed.
My next thought was how much more has mother earth warmed? I know you can’t go by just one summer or one year you have to go back decades. Good old NOAA told me, they say, in part, that the average global land and sea temperature, in 2016, was 1.69 degrees F higher than the 20th century average. I hope you were still sitting down. That’s fact three. I was a little disappointed, all this hoopla over, basically, one and a half degrees, and that doesn’t take into consideration the margin of error.
Fact number four is that the good USA spends tens of billions of dollars on climate change.
I was talking to one person about global warming and she got a little upset and said she wasn’t talking about global warming she was talking about climate change, I thought “what’s the difference?” So I had to find out. The very first sentence in Wikipedia under the definition of global warming is “Global warming, also referred to as climate change…..”. I found a lot of different definitions, but basically they say that global warming is the rising of the earth’s temperature because pollutants, carbon dioxide (the use of fossil fuels) are released into the atmosphere. They say climate change is a change in weather patterns due largely to the increased levels of carbon dioxide produced by the use of fossil fuels. I’ll have to go with Wikipedia on this one, global warming and climate change are one and the same. Fact number five.
Now my last thought was how much global warming did we cause? Now remember fact No. 3, that NOAA said the temperature in 2016 was 1.69 degrees above the 20th Century average, hottest year on record. Then I looked at how much we caused, there are several causes of global warming but people say the main one is CO2, emissions from fossil fuel. Well, I found that the EPA said in 2014 that the United States was responsible for 15 percent. In 2015, Wikipedia had the amount at 14.35 percent. Well to be generous I’ll use the EPA estimate. Fifteen percent of 1.69 equals 0.25. That’s right were responsible for raising the earth’s temperature by a quarter of one degree!! That’s fact No. 6, and my last.
—Craig Martin
Troy