The Earth Has a “Fever”​—Is There a Cure?

THE symptoms are showing​—the temperature is rising. A case in point is the Alaskan village Newtok, located in the subarctic. The once frozen subsoil​—known as permafrost—​on which Newtok is built is melting. “I don’t want to live in permafrost [anymore],” lamented a resident named Frank. “It’s too muddy.” Studies say that within ten years, this coastal village could be washed away.

The “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” concluded the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Rising global temperatures testify to this fact. What scientists call climate change has resulted in extreme weather, including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves, and hurricanes worldwide. What will happen to our planet? Is there a cure?

What Causes Global Warming?

There are three positions on global warming: (1) that global warming is not occurring and so neither is climate change; (2) that global warming and climate change are occurring, but these are natural, cyclic events unrelated to human activity; and (3) that global warming is occurring as a result primarily of human activity and so climate change is also the result of human activity.

The claim that nothing is happening is very hard to defend in the face or masses of visual, land-based and satellite data that clearly shows rising average sea and land temperatures and shrinking ice masses.

The claim that the observed global warming is natural or at least not the result of human carbon emissions (see Climate Skeptics below) focuses on data that shows that world temperatures and atmospheric CO2 levels have been equally high or higher in the past. They also point to the well understood effects of solar activity on the amount of radiation striking the earth and the fact that in recent times the sun has been particularly active.

In general, climate scientists and environmentalists either (1) dispute the data based on, for example, new ice core data or (2) suggest that the timing issue – that is, the rapidity with which the globe has warmed and the climate changed simply do not fit the model of previous natural events. They note also that compared to other stars the sun is actually very stable, varying in energy output by just 0.1% and over a relatively short cycle of 11 to 50 years quite unrelated to global warming as a whole. The data strongly suggests that solar activity affects the global climate in many important ways, but is not a factor in the systemic change over time that we call global warming.

As for the final position that global warming and climate change result from human activity (are “anthropogenic”), scientists attribute current atmospheric warming to human activities that have increased the amount of carbon containing gases in the upper atmosphere and to increased amounts of tiny particles in the lower atmosphere.

Specifically, gases released primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and the tiny particles produced by incomplete burning trap the sun’s energy in the atmosphere. Scientists call these gases “greenhouse gases” (GHGs) because they act like the wrong way reflective glass in our global greenhouse.

Scientists call the tiny particles ‘black carbon’ (you call it soot or smoke) and attribute their warming effect to the fact that the resulting layer of black particles in the lower atmosphere absorbs heat like a black blanket.

Scientists date the beginning of the current warming trend to the end of the 18th or beginning of the 19th century when coal first came into common use.
This warming trend has accelerated as we have increased our use of fossil fuels to include gasoline, diesel, kerosene and natural gas, as well as the petrochemicals (plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers) we now make from oil.

Scientists attribute the current warming trend to the use of fossil fuels because using them releases into the atmosphere stores of carbon that were sequestered (buried) millions of years ago.
The addition of this “old” carbon to the world’s current stock of carbon, scientists have concluded, is what is heating our earth which causes global warming.