What’s a few degrees warmer?

When discussing global climate change invariably someone starts talking about the weather. Weather and climate are not the same. We can comment on changes in weather from day to day or year to year, but climate is much bigger. Climate is from decade to decade or century to century. Sometimes the weather changes and there is a particularly hot summer or mild winter, but that does not prove that climate change is occurring. Climate does not change from year to year like the weather does. The increase of the global temperature even just a few degrees will cause smaller ice sheets, extinction of animals and changes their habitat range, as well as more severe weather. Depending on one’s location this could mean a more brutal winter. Our humanness would lead us to believe that climate change is therefore disproved.

Our humanness causes us to try and find another reason other than ourselves for climate change so that the responsibility of fixing the problem does not fall on our shoulders. So we have blamed sunspots, volcanoes, and the natural cycle of the Earth as reasons for climate change. The truth is that while all these do affect climate change, they are not doing as much as we humans are. Humans manipulate the environment in so many ways from fossil fuel burning to deforestation that we are bound to have an effect. The problem is the effect may not show up for decades or centuries, because it takes a long time to change the climate. People have assumed that the “balance of nature” will simply adjust for all the changes we make. Unfortunately there are too many changes for the environment to compensate, and a small shift in the delicate balance could result in a cataclysmic change.

Humans are too nearsighted to do anything about this. Technology changes so fast and when the effects of one’s actions are not seen for decades it is difficult for humans to see the consequence of their actions. Our human nature tells us we can worry about it later. Now is later. Now, we do not want to put the effort into changing our lifestyle to fix what needs to be done so our human nature says, what’s a few degrees warmer?

Climate change is confusing, especially since something like smog could reflect the sun’s light and cool us down, but green house gasses keep the sun’s rays in and warm us up. Are we warming or are we cooling? It’s difficult to understand all the different factors unless it is your field of study. While the science of modeling can give us a helpful picture, is still new and evolving. For a while models were not representative of Earth, and they all said different things. Although they are much better, there is still no definitive prediction for the future. Climate change is confusing, there are many factors, and we do not immediately see the effects of our actions making climate change difficult to grasp and react to.