Seeing is Believing

Although the scientific discovery of anthropogenic caused global warming has been accepted by the vast majority of the scientific community, there are some knowledge gaps which make climate change difficult for the average person to accept and believe. One of these confusions comes from the misunderstanding of the difference between climate and weather.

It can be easy for someone to believe in global warming when there are record breaking heat waves in their town or state. At the same time, an unusually cold winter or bad blizzard can give skeptics the “proof” they need to say it doesn’t exist. However, these examples can neither prove, nor disprove, global warming. These seasonal variations are examples of weather, not climate. It is true that one aspect of climate change will mean greater variability and more extreme weather conditions, but only one example of extreme weather is not enough to prove climate change. Our humanness restricts our ability to differentiate the difference between weather and climate when it comes to accepting the reality of global warming.

That being said, in recent decades the growing collection of severe weather events (hurricanes, droughts, heat waves) have contributed to the willingness of people to believe in climate change. Aside from all of the scientific studies proving its existence, some of the effects of climate change will happen too gradually for people to notice in their lifetime. Even this idea is proof of our human perception of climate, for what many will think of as a “gradual” change in climate (a few degrees of warming within a century), has never been seen on a similar time scale in the history of the planet.

The earth knows climate change to come in the course of many millennia, but our own humanness can not grasp this time frame of variability. While there are still many political reasons for people to argue that climate change is a hoax, perhaps the ever-warming global temperatures and intensified weather patterns will force the world to accept the truth. These more and more common and dangerous weather events have come as a result of anthropogenic global warming and it will be a shameful reality if it is our humanness which restricts us from believing this fact by the time it is too late to reverse it.