An Opposing View On Climate Change
By: Anonymous, June 13, 2019
Climate change has become a very politically discussed topic and along with most things political, it has become a controversial topic. In order to stay politically correct, this piece will be avoiding personal thoughts as much as possible, and only presenting scientific data to support the claim that climate change is a serious problem that we, as a world, are facing. This piece will be refuting many common arguments against climate change, to read more from that point of view you can go to David Prim’s article “Climate Change Is Not What We Have Been Told” . All sources will be listed at the end of the article.
The one thing that neither side can deny is that our planet has gotten warmer. NASA provides many statistics about our planet on their website. One of those stats is the global temperature, which has been increasing exponentially. That does sound scary, but since 1880 our planet has only gone up 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit—which is still a lot. The good news is the planet has cooled down a very small amount, going from 34 degrees Fahrenheit in 2016 to 33.5 in 2018.
However, this doesn’t mean we no longer have a problem. The Earth’s carbon dioxide levels are at an all-time high. Why is a gas level relevant to the planet’s temperature? Great question! As everyone learned in fourth grade, the Earth has an atmosphere, which is like an invisible force field of gases—or as National Geographic puts it, a filter. It keeps out most of the harmful UV rays from the sun while letting the warmth and light in. The atmosphere is slightly acting as a one-way filter because not much is getting out, especially heat and certain gases that trap heat. Those gases are carbon dioxide, methane, water vapor and nitrous oxide.
*WARNING: this next section does have sprinkles of opinions don’t take all of it as factual evidence unless I gave a source for the claim (and even then do your own research)*
Those are the facts that science has given us. Now to the riskier territory, what is politically being done about this issue? The U.S.’s current head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Andrew Wheeler, doesn’t consider climate change to be his top priority. However, he doesn’t deny its existence or that climate change is impacted by man. It’s no guess as to what our president’s beliefs on climate change are; He very openly denies its existence.
This leads into the first claim against climate change: it’s fake and used as a political scare tactic for votes. Personally, this sounds like a very sound claim. Politics tends to be a manipulative game. But because Trump has always been very open about his opinion on the topic it doesn’t seem like a way to get votes, especially because Trump is appointing like-minded people to his administration. Actually, our government isn’t really doing anything about climate change. As Wheeler has stated, climate change isn’t his top priority, its water. In April Trump pushed states to speed up construction of oil and gas pipelines, which are big contributors to the harmful gases in our atmosphere.
Another reason used to deny climate change is that there are prominent scientists speaking out against the topic. There is a petition that has gone around that was created by Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and it has been signed by over 30,000 people with a BS or higher. That seems like a lot, but it’s actually only about .3% of the people who have graduated with a science BS in the US since 1970, which is 10.6 million according to the US Department of Education. When that number of signees is taken out of context it seems like a majority of scientists are against climate change, but that’s not true.
Tying it back into politics, many of the scientists making claims against climate change have political sponsors against it or business interests that would be harmed from regulations put in place to help stop climate change. That does go both ways, a lot of people believe that government paid scientists are only making claims about climate change because they get paid to. Ultimately it’s up to you who to believe, but please do research on both sides of the topic, because if you only read articles in favor of your bias you won’t have a very credible opinion.
Sources: skepticalscience.com, time.com, nationalgeographic.org, climate.nasa