Awesome post a couple of days ago over at Starts With A Bang. It’s titled, “How Could We Affect The Earth?“, and it details in layman’s terms what exactly we’re talking about here. It’s said that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, but there is no arguing with simple numbers that undeniably show we are exponentially increasing the amount of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere.
There are a lot of global warming skeptics out there who genuinely don’t seem to understand what they’re talking about, which isn’t unusual when science is discussed in political or ideological terms. The problem with discussing science in non-science terms is that you end up discussing ideas and opinions, not hard data. Well, this post contains just the tip of the iceberg of the hard data behind global warming, but it should be enough to convince any reasonable person that what’s currently going on just isn’t right:
…doing the math on these statistics, from 1800 to 1950, the world’s human population released 300 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. You’ll notice that, because this was such a (relatively) small amount released over a (relatively) long time, the effect on carbon dioxide concentration wasn’t very pronounced.
But over the next 30 years, from 1950-1980, we really ramped up out fossil fuel consumption, and over those 30 years we put out 390 billion tonnes — more than the past 150 years — in just 3 decades. You’ll notice that the rise in carbon dioxide concentration over that time is pretty steep.
And as for the last 29 years, from 1980-2009? We’ve put out more fossil fuels than ever before: an unprecedented 725 billion tonnes over that timespan. So what does all of this mean for our atmosphere? Could humanity — a few billion tiny animals — really affect the entire atmosphere of our planet?
Well, could we? What do you think? If we keep pouring hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, and that keeps increasing at an esponential rate, how could we NOT have an effect? I honestly don’t get the skeptical argument here – it’s like saying that someone could light a cigar in your house and you’d never notice the smell.
What folly. When discussing science, let’s just consider science. Nature does not know about or care about our politics, religions or ideologies, and we will all eventually perish if we try to confront nature with our trivial pastimes.
