For many years there have been very legitimate doubts about the seriousness of the danger in global warming, and even more so about the role of humanity in the process. If so, today scientists can afford to be clearer: almost all new evidence supports the existence of a global warming process.
In the latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consisting of the best scientists working in the field, (including a number of renowned skeptics) the final conclusion is that "human actions have contributed significantly to the warming observed over the last fifty years". The aforementioned report is also based on a large number of recently published studies in order to answer a number of questions raised by the skeptics:
Is the process actually happening?
There are researchers who question determinations such as that of the US National Institute of Atmospheric and Oceanic Research that three out of the last five years have set heat records, based on information from the last hundred years, while attacking the fact that these conclusions are based on land-based observations. Since most of the measurement points, especially the old and oldest among them, tend to be near human settlements, including large cities, and since settlements and cities (which make up no more than 2% of the land area of KDA) are warmer than nature by the very nature of human settlements, then one could expect that throughout the past century, when the cities became larger and more populated, and the energy consumption of their inhabitants increased, we can at the same time expect an increase in the heat in their surroundings. These researchers often cite data obtained from satellites indicating that the lower troposphere (which extends from the ground to an altitude of 8 km) is not warming at all https://wwwssl.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd12mar97_1.htm. They claim that this inconsistency in the findings, which is particularly evident in the tropical regions, also calls into question other data that indicate global warming (https://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/temperature)
These arguments led theNational Research Council In the US to establish a panel of experts to investigate the issue. The conclusions were that the discrepancy originates from measurement deviations that result from non-continuous measurement along the troposphere, i.e. measurement of only its upper part. This part has been affected in recent years by a number of events that resulted in its cooling without affecting the rest of the atmosphere, for example the eruption of the Pinitobo volcano in the Philippines, in 1991, and the huge fires in the rainforests of East Asia in 1998-96. These findings lead theNRC To the conclusion that it is possible that the warming process is even accelerated even more than previously thought.
Is global warming an anomaly or part of normal climate change
There is another argument from researchers who doubt the existence of global warming regarding the perspective of scientific observation. According to them, orders of magnitude of years, decades, or even hundreds are dwarfed compared to previous climate cycles. They point out that at the end of the last ice age there were sharp changes in the climate both upwards and (although less, naturally), downwards. The argument for this is that new studies based on drilling into the ice in the Vostok area in Antarctica to depths representing tens of thousands of years ago illustrate exactly how much damage will be caused by a change of a few degrees. The other place to check for long-term changes is the sea, which is a huge reservoir of energy, in which changes occur slowly. From the measurement of the energy content of the oceans, an unequivocal conclusion emerges - the energy content has been consistently increasing in recent decades.
Is humanity really to blame?
The most compelling argument against this conclusion lies in the lack of unequivocal information about the causes of climate change. Long before the existence of the human race, not least before the industrial age, the planet experienced drastic climate changes. The climate around the world has alternately warmed and cooled in cycles for which we do not understand all the reasons. Some of the presumed causes include volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation or creakings in the Earth's rotation. The problem is that human activities may affect us in ways we do not understand and to extents we cannot predict. Carbon dioxide, for example, is produced when hydrocarbon fuel is burned, or when forests catch fire, but these processes also result in the release of ash particles into the atmosphere. These particles form nuclei around which clouds are formed that lead to a decrease in the amount of radiation that hits the earth, and thus actually lead to a decrease in temperatures.
Do you have anything to say about it? Join the debate club
Want to learn to prepare and present speeches? Sign up for a public speaking course