The debate over climate change has shifted several times during its 30-year-span, but the fundamental question has, for the most part, remained the same. It began in the 1970s, a negative shift in global temperature supposedly caused by aerosols. The 1990s saw the carbon levels of the Antarctic ice cores properly analyzed, and the long-term trend was seen to be toward warming, instead of cooling. Unlike global cooling, however, the warming trend was able to be conclusively shown and has produced dramatic results. The debate has now shifted once again; with outright denial no longer an option, global warming has been accepted as fact, and its causes are instead under scrutiny.
Those who denied global warming at first have now switched track. Instead of arguing it doesn’t exist, it is now attributed to purely natural forces. The idea that humans are capable of altering something immense as the climate is absurd, the argument runs, and the current hype over man-made global warming is little more than a publicity stunt.
The facts, however, speak differently. The net effect of human progress for the last 150 years has been to continuously convert ground-based carbon to carbon dioxide with ever-increasing efficiency. The world’s output is currently 7 billion tons of CO2 per year, and this number is constantly increasing. We also have been systematically destroying forests, the only natural way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere, since roughly the same period.
Beyond this, we have been reproducing at a prodigious rate, the population doubling-time reducing by half with each successive iteration. The current doubling time is 30 years; with the global population at 3 billion in the 1960s.
To accommodate these numbers, we have spread to every continent and occupied nearly every piece of arable land. This boom in population has caused our food system to be entirely re-organized. Instead of small subsistence farms, we now have gigantic corporate farms.
To produce the staggering amount of food necessary to feed a burgeoning population, farms have begun to utilize aqueous ammonia fertilizers and industrial tractors. The problem with these methods is that they require a large amount of energy to implement.
The amount of energy required to produce ammonia or power farm equipment ensures that every calorie of food produced requires several more calories of carbon energy to produce. Merely by existing, we are putting far more carbon in the atmosphere than any other organism.
People who lean conservatively have always been skeptical of climate change, and their claims have grown more and more fanciful as the science has become more concrete. To uphold the idea that man-made climate change is impossible, the deniers have resorted to a number of pseudo-scientific explanations for the warming trend. Solar fluctuations are a favorite. According to many conservatives, they are solely to blame for the current shift in weather.
I have not seen any actual scientific evidence to support this, but I have seen a gamut of scientific-looking articles describing with confidence the hypothetical fluctuations that could be to blame. They do not stand to scrutiny, however.
Other arguments include the refutation of very specific details in the evidence for man-made climate change, and the assertion that these tiny points of contention invalidate the entire concept.
In fact, the tactic used most by climate change deniers amounts to little more than an ad hominem attack on Al Gore. He seems to have become the favorite target, and any discussion regarding climate change inevitably devolves into an attack on Gore’s character. Gore is accused of being hypocrite for preaching conservation on one hand, and using airplanes and electricity on the other. He is even accused of inventing climate change purely for political purposes. It would seem global warming is simply a ploy, an enormous hoax designed solely to feed Gore’s ego. This is difficult to believe.
It reflects the very real fear of the severe implications global warming will have for our society. Like it or not climate change is a stark reality. The sooner we wake from our reverie, the sooner the problem can be addressed.
Pavan Vangipuram is a State News columnist and a chemical engineering junior. Reach him at vangipu1@msu.edu.
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