Any politician who tells you that global climate change is a hoax is either willfully ignorant or deliberately lying. Politicians have staff and one of the tasks for any politician’s staff is to get the facts on issues of importance to that politician. How the politician chooses to deal with those facts – accept, ignore or hide them – is another matter. Any Congressional staffer doing even the most rudimentary – bare bones – investigation into the science behind global climate change will learn the following.
Fact: Carbon atoms are the fourth most abundant element in the universe and the basis of life as we know it. As atoms go, carbon is also somewhat of a slut, an electron donor with four electrons available to form strong chemical bonds with any receptor atom that will have it.
Fact: A carbon atom is happy to engage with multiple partners, most notoriously with two atoms of oxygen to form a molecule of carbon dioxide.
Fact: The carbon dioxide molecule by virtue of the energy and architecture of its electronic bonds is a voracious heat-trap. When infrared photons (heat) strike a carbon dioxide molecule, more of those photons will be absorbed than will pass through.
Fact: Carbon dioxide is a molecule with impressive staying power. About 20-percent of all the carbon dioxide molecules emitted into the atmosphere this year will still be there 800 years from now.
Fact: While carbon dioxide is a natural part of Earth’s atmosphere, it is naturally only a tiny part of the atmosphere. There’s just enough natural carbon dioxide to keep the atmosphere – like the porridge that Goldilocks ate – not too hot and not too cold. At the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, carbon dioxide made up about 0.028-percent of the atmosphere.
Fact: Today carbon dioxide makes up .039-percent of the atmosphere – a 28-percent increase since the Industrial Revolution launched an aerial carbon dioxide assault.
Fact: Human activity since the Industrial Revolution has released nearly one trillion tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as a result of burning fossil fuels.
Fact: Half of this amount was added in the last 30 years.
Fact: Earth’s average global temperature has risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degrees Celsius) since the start of the 20th Century.
Fact: Most of this increase took place since 1980.
Fact: The difference between the average global temperature today and the last Ice Age is about 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius)
Put all the facts together and do the math. It does not require a super-computer to determine the following: When you release a huge volume of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the atmosphere will heat up. It’s not politics, it’s chemistry.
What happens when the atmosphere rises to unnaturally high temperatures – the track we are currently on? Weather patterns change. You can think of it as weather on steroids or the Barry Bonds analogy. For those who do not follow sports, Barry Bonds was a professional baseball player, one of the best of his generation. Early in his career with the Pittsburgh Pirates, his physique was sinewy and lean, like a panther. He hit 34 homeruns at the age of 28 in his best season at Pittsburgh. By 2001, he was playing for the San Francisco Giants and he was 36 years old, an age at which most professional athletes are well into decline. He had the physique of a grizzly bear and his head was the size of a watermelon. Just about everyone, including his ex-wife, believed he was taking steroids. That year he crushed 73 homeruns, the most ever by anyone in a single season and more than twice as many as when he was in his athletic prime. Did Barry Bonds hit homeruns before he allegedly took steroids? Yes. But after he allegedly took steroids, the homeruns became a much more frequent occurrence and many of them were titanic – “tape-measure” shots. That’s what happens to weather as the atmosphere continues to heat up. Storms of the century appear two or three times a decade, 40-year floods become annual events, the freakish becomes the norm.
What all of this means is that if we do nothing to dramatically slow down the rate at which our activities are spewing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, our grandchildren might very well be seeing Christmas cards showing Santa at the North Pole sunning himself in a canoe. My former boss, the Nobel laureate Steve Chu, who at the writing of this post is the Secretary of Energy, used to draw the analogy between global climate change and the electrical wiring of a house. “If experts told you that over the next ten years, there’s a 50-50 chance your electrical wiring will catch fire and burn down your house,” Chu used to ask, “would you change the wiring or take your chances?”
Experts are telling us that over the next few decades, and maybe sooner, our carbon dioxide emissions will reach a tipping point and the Earth is going to become a different planet. What are we going to do about it? When my daughters were growing up, I told them that people change their ways for one of two reasons: They want to, or they have to. Politicians know what you want to hear and that’s what most of them will tell you. Scientists don’t care what you want to hear, they’ll present you with the best available data and the best available data on global climate change and the burning of fossil fuels says this: We have to change our ways.