On April 18, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded the first-ever instrumental measurement of an atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) level above 410 parts per million (ppm). The level at Mauna Loa was 280 ppm when instrumental measurements started in 1958. As we all know, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, molecularly capable of trapping heat radiating from earth’s surface, and as its atmospheric concentration increases it traps more heat.
According to Climate Central, an independent organization of leading climate scientists, at the end of March, Earth had experienced 627 consecutive months of warmer than normal temperatures. Using the baseline 1881 to 1910, for over 52 years there has not been a single month below the average baseline temperature for that month.
Another recent Climate Central article, based on new research published in the open-access journal Nature Communications, states “If carbon emissions continue on their current trajectory … by mid-century, the atmosphere could reach a state unseen in 50 million years. Back then, temperatures were up to 18 F (10 C) warmer, ice was almost nowhere to be seen and oceans were dramatically higher than they are now.”
On March 29, the House Committee on Science, Space, & Technology held a hearing “Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications, and the Scientific Method” chaired by Lamar Smith, R-Texas. Given the current trajectory described above, one might expect this hearing to focus on the problem we face and actions we might take. But the Republican majority of this committee was not interested in climate science. Of the four scientists invited to testify before the committee, three deny the consensus view of 97 percent of climate scientists that global warming and climate change is real, caused by us, and bad. To fairly represent the science, if there are three scientists invited to testify who do not support the consensus, there should be 97 invited who do. Instead there was one.
Then in his opening remarks, Chairman Smith accused climate scientists of straying “outside the principles of the scientific method” and that “the demands of scientific verification preclude long-range prediction.” he said, “Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses. The ability to predict far into the future is impossible. Anyone stating what the climate will be in 500 years or even the end of the century is not credible.”
Clearly, Smith has no idea what he is talking about. Climate science is based on well-known laws of chemistry and physics, which will be the same at the end of this century or in 500 years as they are today. Atmospheric CO2 will remain a greenhouse gas in the future and as such must trap heat. The more there is the more heat it will trap. The projections scientists make about the future are not “wild guesses,” they are projections based on possible future emissions scenarios.
Kevin Trenberth, distinguished senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in an article in The Conversation, a not-for-profit academic and research media outlet, wrote “In much the same way as we can predict the orbits of planets around the sun for millions of years, so climate models tell us that ice will melt in a much warmer world and sea level will rise as a consequence.”
In a short video, “Science in America,” Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium for Earth and Space in New York City, says “When you have people who don’t know much about science, standing in denial of it and raising to power, that is a recipe for the complete dismantling of our informed democracy.”
“Science is an entire exercise in finding what is true.” Out of science “arises the new emergent truth. When you have an established emergent truth, it is true whether or not you believe in it, and the sooner you understand that the sooner we can get on with the political conversation about how to solve the problems that face us..”
With a president, vice president, EPA administrator, and chair of the House Science, Space, & Technology Committee, we, as Dr. Tyson said, “have people who don’t know much about science, standing in denial of it and raising to power” and, are witnessing “the dismantling of our informed democracy.”
We must elect scientifically informed leaders and rebuild an informed democracy!
William Gran, is a retired adjunct instructor at Greenfield Community College on global warming and climate change. He can be reached at whgran@gmail.com.