Letter: People think climate science is clear — it isn’t

Posted 6/7/18

People confuse climate change with global warming. Global warming is part of climate change, but climate change is more than global warming. Climate Change is a vague term that means different things …

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Letter: People think climate science is clear — it isn’t

Posted

People confuse climate change with global warming. Global warming is part of climate change, but climate change is more than global warming. Climate Change is a vague term that means different things to different people.

About all that can be said is that the climate is changing, it has changed in the past (long before humans) and it will continue to change in the future.

So, what are we left with? For the sake of brevity let’s break down what climate change is into three main components:

1. Ocean levels are changing (rising).

2. Weather patterns are changing (for good and bad for life on Earth)

3. Global temperature is changing (warming).

1. Yes, the oceans are currently rising. How much and at what rate is not really known exactly. We do not know for certain that they will continue to rise. They have risen and fallen in the past, and I suspect that they will continue to rise and fall in the future.

2. Yes, weather patterns are changing. In what way or to what extent is not known.  sk yourself, can the weather man accurately, I mean really accurately, tell you what the weather will be like on some day next week, let alone over the next 10, 50 or 100 years?

3. Enough data has been collected to confidently say that recently the Earth is warming up.  However, the causes of the warming are still debatable. A letter on May 31 pointed out that an increase in the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is an important cause. The amount of heating attributable to CO2 (80 percent?) has not been proven with the certainty as has, say, for example the laws of motion.

In addition, there are sources other than human activities putting more CO2 into the air. It really is not known exactly how much of the increase of CO2 is caused by humans.

I would like to point out that in 1958, when the measurements began in Hawaii, the figure was 315 ppm (parts per million). Today it is 410 ppm.  When you change the measurement to parts per ten-thousand, the figures are more understandable to me. They turn into about 3 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 air molecules in 1958 and about 4 molecules of CO2 per 10,000 air molecules in 2018.

For example: imagine, 10 thousand things, like 10 thousand blades of grass, and three are yellow. Now imagine 10 thousand blades of grass and four are yellow. Personally, I do not believe, and no one can show me how, just 1 more molecule of CO2 is the main cause of the increase in global warming.

What bothers me the most are people who claim that the causes of and the future of climate change are “settled science.” Such claims are just absurd. Scientists need to collect data for the entire planet and the Sun. 

We do not even know what data needs to be collected, nor for how long, in order to make accurate predictions for the future. Scientific models made 10 or more years ago predicted wild changes that did not happen. Not even close!

Another misconception is that climate change is the result due mostly to human activity. We perceive that we affect the Earth much more than we actually do, probably because we can and do greatly affect some plant and animal populations.

I feel the global effects of human activity on climate change are overrated, especially when you consider that the entire population of the Earth (7 billion), when packed tightly together in a crowd like at a rock concert (approximately 3 people in every 2-foot by 2-foot space), would occupy only about 32 percent of the land area of the entire state of Rhode Island (do not include Narragansett Bay, just the land)!

Check a globe and try to find the State of Rhode Island, let alone only 32 percent of the land. We are not the main cause of the geophysical changes across the entire planet.

More of the right data needs to be collected for a longer period of time. Only then, maybe, can science accurately tell us something about our planet’s future.

Dale Hennessey

Little Compton

Mr. Hennessy is a retired science teacher.

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