Combating climate change deniers

By 1Sky blogging working group member Andy Silber. See Andy's bio at the end of this post. -- Ines

It must be difficult to remain a climate change denier and read the news. The headlines are covered with stories that are exactly what the climate models predict:

• 2010 is the world's hottest year on record
• More rain threatens to worsen Pakistan floods
• Moscow heat wave death rate doubles to 700 per day
• Massive ice island breaks off Greenland

And that's just within the last week!

No one single event can prove (or disprove) climate change is happening or that it's caused by human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG), but there's an old saying that if something walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, there's a pretty good chance you have a duck in front of you.

The point isn't that we should have to prove with scientific certainty that human emissions are causing the climate change before we take action, only that we have sufficient certainty and that the impacts are sufficient that we need to act. So let's review some of what we know about the climate. No fancy models or complex assumptions.

• We are burning large amounts of fossil fuel that introduce CO2 into the atmosphere.
• The atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been increasing since at least the 1960.
• The increase in CO2 is less than the amount we're emitting into the atmosphere
• CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
• All things being equal, increasing the concentration of a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere will increase the temperature.
• Warm air can hold more water vapor, which is an even more important greenhouse gas than CO2.
• The pH of the ocean is changing because the rest of the CO2 we're burning is going into the ocean.

Exactly how increasing the GHG changes the climate is an incredibly complex question involving lots of assumptions that can be argued. The scientists who have been studying climate change do argue about these assumptions and are constantly testing them, improving them and trying to better predict what's in store for us.

Any discussion about climate change needs to begin with the points above and the question, "Why don't you think climate change is happening?" When I have asked that question to people who don't think climate change is happening the answer is always political, not scientific. The answer is in the context of a political theory of libertarianism/small government that has no way to address the problem, so they deny there is a problem. When I attempt to change the question to "If there is human caused climate change, how should we address it?", the response has always been "But there is no climate change.". The deniers are locked in a world that is untainted by data, so I don't expect that their worldview is going to be troubled by a few fires, failures of ice sheets, floods or fatal heat waves.

Andy Silber is a astrophysicist, engineer, project manager, husband, father, and energy activist living in Seattle. Visit Andy's blog on Sustainable West Seattle. The author's opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the 1Sky campaign.-- Ines