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Clearing up Misconceptions About Climate Change - Trump's Climate Change Denial

  • Writer: Holden M
    Holden M
  • Jan 29, 2019
  • 9 min read

Monday evening, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:

"In the beautiful Midwest, windchill [sic] temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? [sic] Please come back fast, we need you!"

There are quite a few issues with this tweet, and I could write a whole book on all the scientific inaccuracies, not to mention the grammatical errors, but I won't bore you with that. I'll give you the SparkNotes version: What our President is describing here is not climate, an average of temperatures over a 20+ year period, which is what is changing. This is a description of weather, which changes. For example, it is currently winter here in the US. In addition, climate change does not say that all areas will warm. For example, Europe will get colder as ice melts and currents bring cold water down and around the U.K., Scandinavia, and mainland Europe.

This is not the first time Trump has confused climate and weather either:

On November 21, 2018, he tweeted this:

"Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever [sic] happened to Global Warming?"

Again, weather is not climate. Anything you can describe as a "cold blast" is weather, not climate.

"In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!"

He may be having a tough time differentiating between climate and weather, but possibly, he is just playing dirty and ignoring it for political gain. Now, I wouldn't put it past him to not know the difference, but he has been known to play dirty in politics, and has revealed this recently in his recent government shutdown, which lasted 35 days only to be ended by a measure that was almost the exact same as one proposed before the shutdown, which he vetoed.

Either way, this reveals a bigger issue: Science denial is rampant in American politics and culture. Now, I don't want this post to just be a Trump-bashing party; we could just go to the Twitter replies for that. Instead, I'll provide the scientific basis and evidence for why climate change is happening, what it is, its long-term implications, and what I think the best way for us to deal with it is.

First off, we should make the distinction between climate and weather. The National Ocean Service puts it very well: "Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get."

Weather is volatile. It can change in an instant, and is very difficult to predict. In order to know what the weather was going to do within the next hour or two, you would need to know the temperature and conditions of every molecule of air in the atmosphere on Earth at the same time. This is why meteorologists report whether it will rain as a percentage, and can't say for sure that it will or won't rain. They generally use previous patterns of weather to try to predict what the weather will look like in the next few days.

Climate is an average. Take the weather at a certain place at each hour of each day for the past 20, 50, or even 100 years and average it out, and you have that place's climate.

The fact that it is an average, however, makes the climate change seem quite slow to us. Imagine you had a data set with 50 points that are all relatively near each other. If you remove one and add one point that is 10-20% higher, you will not change the average by very much.

In fact, I'll try this with a small data set. Here is a set of 10 numbers within 1-2 integers of each other, and the average of them is listed as 29.8:

Now, replace the last number I listed with a 33. This is 2 above the max value of the past and 3.2 above the former average. However, it only increases the average by 0.2.

Now, the real method for calculating climate is much more complex than this, but I think that this is probably the reason many people choose not to believe the science behind climate change. A year that is above average in temperature will only bring up the average by a little bit, enough that people will barely notice, like a frog in water that is slowly boiling. In addition, people see the relatively small numbers of change in temperature and assume that it is mostly benign. They see that the average temperature has risen by 2°C (3.6°F) and think, "Oh, that's not too much. That won't hurt us."

However, an increase of 2 degrees would be catastrophic. A study done in April of 2016 by the European Geosciences Union found that with an increase of 2 degrees, the following would happen:

  • Tropical coral reefs would have no chance at recovering and reversing their recent losses. At a 1.5 degree increase, the reefs would be able to adapt, but with an increase this high, they would be basically eradicated by the turn of the century.

Imagine this, everywhere.

Imagine this, but over the entirety of the reefs.

  • Crops would produce less, especially maize and wheat in West Africa and Central America. The reduction could double the reduction already felt at a 1.5 degree increase.

  • Out-of-the-ordinary weather events would be a third more powerful than with a 1.5 degree increase. Heat waves would be a third more powerful, rain storms would be a third more intense, the sea level would rise by one third more than it already has, etc. What this really means is that what President Trump has cited as evidence for a lack of climate change is actually evidence to the contrary; that there is climate change occurring as storms get more intense.

Extreme precipitation has already been on the rise for quite a few years. Climate change could amplify these effects.

  • The area around the Mediterranean would have around 20% less available fresh water than there was in the late 20th century. This could cause a water crisis and artificially raise the prices to a resource needed for basic survival.

You might be thinking, okay, great, climate change would be terrible, but how do we know it's already happening?

NASA's climate change website shows 9 strong pieces of evidence, but I think the most important are as follows:

Warming Oceans and Shrinking Ice Sheets

A study by NASA, CalTech, and UC Irvine from 2013 has shown that the heat from warmed oceans has caused massive melting from the bottom of Antarctica. Specifically, the study found that basal melt, or melt from the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet due to warming oceans, has contributed a little over half of total ice mass loss from Antarctica between 2003 and 2008.

Also, the rate at which ice sheets have been declining in mass has been increasing. Here are two graphs: One shows the rate of change in mass of Antarctica, and the other shows the same for Greenland:

These charts, combined with the data that shows more mass lost due to melt due to warmer oceans, provide evidence that the oceans have taken much of the change in climate. Combined, with a rise in global temperature, this provides a fairly complete picture for an Earth that is warming over time.

Global Temperature Rise

2016 was recorded as the warmest year under modern record keeping, and was the third year in a row to do so. The global average temperatures increased 1.78 degrees Fahrenheit, or 0.99 degrees Celsius, over the average for the middle of the 20th century.

This trend has been going for many years. NASA has a video showing a map of the Earth over time, from 1880-2016, with bluer areas being colder than average, and redder areas being warmer than average. You can watch as the blue starts to fade away and the world becomes redder and redder.

Temperatures have been well over average for many years as well. April of 2018 became the four hundredth month in a row to have temperatures above the average of the 20th century. This means we haven't had a single month where, globally, the temperature has gone below the average for just about 70 years ago in over 34 years.

Now, many people claim this looks like it could be natural variation over time. We did have an ice age at one point, right?

Here is a graph of the last 1500 years of global temperatures, courtesy of NASA:

While the lack of accurate reading for temperatures millions of years ago does not let us analyze temperature change back then, within the last 1500 years, which does have a fair amount of natural change within it, we see no point where the rate at which the temperature increased was so consistently steep for so long, leading us to conclude that this is not just natural variation.

Now, most scientists refer to anthropogenic climate change as the real threat. How do we know that climate change is anthropogenic, or caused by us humans?

Compare the graph of average temperatures to this graph of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere:

Here are the two graphs laid on top of each other to help you see the patterns:

The temperature graph over time and the amount of carbon dioxide line up very closely. What does this mean? The most likely explanation is that the carbon emissions from industrialization of the 1880s helped to raise temperatures. But how?

This is the greenhouse effect. Essentially, this is the entire foundation for how we are causing Earth's temperatures to rise. This works because of some of the properties of the gases that we are releasing into the atmosphere.

Usually, with normal amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sun's energy enters the atmosphere and interacts with the nitrogen and oxygen, which are both made of two atoms and are held together relatively tightly, and thus cannot vibrate and thus can absorb heat much less easily. This allows a large portion of the radiation from the sun to be released back into the atmosphere.

However, greenhouse gases are made up of three or more atoms and are bound more loosely, meaning that they can vibrate and thus, absorb more heat. They keep this heat for longer, but eventually releases it, where it is likely to end up in another greenhouse gas molecule. This keeps the heat closer to Earth for much longer and allows much more accumulation of heat.

Now, how can we prevent climate change from doing permanent damage to our planet? I see this as a three-step process.

  1. First, we need to start from the ground up. We give cities, counties, and state incentives via federal funding to begin changing their power sources towards more renewable sources of energy, such as solar power, and away from fossil fuels.

  2. Next, we need to tackle the national government. We need to move the federal facilities and national parks to fully renewable energy, and make them emission-free. If we need to add funding to accomplish this, it should come from raising the corporate tax rate. Big companies got us into this mess, so their money should get us out of it.

  3. Last, we implement a carbon tax. This would disincentivize the usage of fossil fuels, and raise revenue to help encourage renewable energy at the city/county level. In addition, if a corporation were able to go completely emission-free, we could deduct the raised corporate tax rate for them as a reward.

This all sounds pretty idealistic, but we need to take drastic measures if we're going to conquer climate change before it's too late. However, none of this is possible if the public is not educated on how climate change works and how it will affect us in the future.

Pages Referenced:

[4] - CNN Politics, "Senate passes stop-gap funding bill in effort to avert government shutdown" - https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/19/politics/government-shutdown-congress-trump-border-wall/index.html

[5] - NOAA, "What is the difference between weather and climate?" - https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/weather_climate.html

[6] - Calculator.net, Mean, Median, Mode, Range Calculator - https://www.calculator.net/mean-median-mode-range-calculator.html

[7] - EGU, "1.5°C vs 2°C global warming – new study shows why half a degree matters" - https://www.egu.eu/news/230/15c-vs-2c-global-warming-new-study-shows-why-half-a-degree-matters/ (original paper: http://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/7/327/2016)

[8] - Greenwood High School, "The Great Barrier Reef is Dying" - https://gatornews.org/15711/opinion/the-great-barrier-reef-is-dying/ (used picture)

[9] - National Climate Assessment, "Extreme Weather" - https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/highlights/report-findings/extreme-weather (used picture)

[10] - NASA, "Climate change: How do we know?" - https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

[11] - NASA, "Warming ocean causing most Antarctic ice shelf mass loss" - https://climate.nasa.gov/news/937/warming-ocean-causing-most-antarctic-ice-shelf-mass-loss/

[13] - NASA, "NASA, NOAA Data Show 2016 Warmest Year on Record Globally" - https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20170118/

[14] - NASA, "Graphic: Global warming from 1880 to 2017" - https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/139/graphic-global-warming-from-1880-to-2017/

[15] - Bloomberg, "For 400 Months in a Row, the Earth Has Been Warmer Than 20th Century Average" - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-17/april-was-400th-consecutive-month-world-warmer-than-20th-century

[16] - NASA Earth Observatory, "How is Today's Warming Different from the Past?" - https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page3.php

[17] - US EPA, "Global Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data" - https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-data

[18] - Climate Science for Sceptics, "Is Our Climate Changing? and Why?" - http://www.cs4s.net/climate-2.html (used picture)

[19] - University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Center for Science Education, "The Greenhouse Effect" - https://scied.ucar.edu/longcontent/greenhouse-effect

[20] - Australian Department of the Environment and Energy, "Greenhouse effect" - http://www.environment.gov.au/climate-change/climate-science-data/climate-science/greenhouse-effect

 
 
 

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