Is Climate Change Real?

Is climate change for real?

The media is in a frenzy. Our children have taken to the streets to protest what could be the end of their futures. We are told that we have just 11 years to turn this boat around, and even then it won’t stop the disasters caused by man-made climate change, just the worst of its effects. Nearly everyone in the 2020 US presidential campaign has a plan to stop it, yet for all there talk there has been a whole lot of sitting around not doing anything on the topic.

Just what is “climate change,” and is it even real?

Our planet’s climate is actually always in flux. Temperatures have changed from the time of the dinosaurs (and yes earlier, but you get the idea) all the way up to the present. What’s different and concerning now, is that humans have changed our planet’s atmosphere by releasing greenhouse gases that trap warm air in the atmosphere.

The concern is that global warming caused by human intervention will cause a rapid change in climate, causing the extinction of animals who are unprepared for those changes, up to and even including us.

I’m not a climate scientist. I’m a concerned mother that wants to make sure there will be a world for my children to raise their children in. Fortunately, thanks to the internet it’s easy to check out tons of peer reviewed studies, associations for scientists, top tier schools, and basically everywhere you can expect learned people to be. These are just a few of the scientists, ivy league schools, and government organizations who agree that climate change is real, and caused by humans:

• American Meterological Society
• American Geophysical Union
• American Association for the Advancement of Science

• American Astronomical Society
• American Chemical Society
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Physics
• American Physical Society
• Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
• Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO
• British Antarctic Survey
• Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
• Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
• Environmental Protection Agency
• European Geosciences Union
• European Physical Society
• Federation of American Scientists
• Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies
• Geological Society of America
• Geological Society of London
• Harvard
• International Union for Quaternary Research (INQUA)
• International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics
• Ministry for the Environment (New Zealand)
• NASA
• National Center for Atmospheric Research
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Royal Meteorological Society
• Royal Society of the UK
• Union for Concerned Scientists
• Yale

On to climate change denial, I could find no universities denying human caused climate change. I could find no organization of scientists or official government websites denying human caused climate change. The best I could find were websites backed by government officials who were in turn backed by companies with a vested interest in ignoring climate change. On these websites, I did find individual scientists here and there with reputable credentials who denied climate change on their own.

As I’ve said before, I am not personally a climate scientist, but if I was in a room with 50 botanists, 47 of them telling me a plant is poisonous, and 3 of which insist that it’s benign or even healthy, I wouldn’t feed it to my children.

Unfortunately, global warming isn’t something we can opt out of, and it’s my children, and your children, who will reep what we sow.

And what if we’re wrong? What if we all agree to fix the problem and it turns out it was all a hoax? Well, darn it. We’ll have cleaned this planet up and made a better world for nothing.