I find it kind of amusing that a large group of people questions the science of global warming (climate change caused by humans burning hydrocarbons). So I thought the best way to illustrate the craziness of the deniers would be to ask, how do you know oxygen exists? Almost all of us took some biology and chemistry in high school. We did some sort of experiment and, hopefully, didn’t blow up the lab. I think that most of us remember the experiment that we did using a technique called electrolysis. We took water and passed an electric current through it. Hydrogen went into one tube and oxygen into the other. But how do we know that was oxygen? We’ve been told, over and over, that oxygen makes up 21% of our atmosphere. But you can’t see oxygen. You cannot taste it. (More about oxygen here.) How do we know? Well, it is based on the molecular theory. Molecular theory? It’s a theory, not a proven fact.
This is the same line of questioning the deniers use. Yet, the same scientific methods that convinced us that oxygen exists have been used to prove climate change is secondary to man’s burning of fossil fuels.
Climate change. Conservatives have taken this term and run with it. They played on the fact that most Americans know a little bit of science, but not much. Most of us remember that there were many ice ages. The Earth warmed, and the ice receded. The Earth cooled, and ice spread over large continents. So, every time a scientist mentions climate change, conservatives point to this natural cycle. They then ask, “How do we know that the warming trend that we’re seeing now is not part of this natural cycle?” Before I answer, let me add one more thing. One of the final arguments deniers use is that the world is so big, and you and I are pretty small compared to it. How can we, as God-fearing little human beings, have an impact on this great big world of ours? This is probably the deniers’ weakest and simplest argument. There are multiple ways to refute this argument. Let me just say that currently scientists have tested the air in California and have detected pollutants that were generated, beyond a shadow of a doubt, in China. So what happens in one part of the world can affect people thousands of miles away.
How can climatologists point to some of the events that are happening now as evidence of climate change secondary to man’s burning fossil fuels? Well, thankfully, I don’t have to come up with an experiment off the top of my head. Smart people, scientists, have done this for us. A few places in the world don’t change much. In fact, they haven’t changed for thousands of years. One place is Antarctica; the other is Greenland. In these two places, it gets extremely cold. In some places, the ice is several miles thick. NASA explains it like this:
Throughout each year, layers of snow fall over the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Each layer of snow is different in chemistry and texture, summer snow differing from winter snow. Summer brings 24 hours of sunlight to the polar regions, and the top layer of the snow changes in texture—not melting exactly, but changing enough to be different from the snow it covers. The season turns cold and dark again, and more snow falls, forming the next layers of snow. Each layer gives scientists a treasure trove of information about the climate each year. Like marine sediment cores, an ice core provides a vertical timeline of past climates stored in ice sheets and mountain glaciers.
