Global Climate Change, Understanding the Data

Blog Post about the science behind global climate change

            This week had to read the IPCC 2014 climate change report summary for policymakers. Right off the bat you notice the complexity of the climate change issue. Throughout the report, numerous graphs are used to indicate various changes and effect of the climate that the policymakers should learn and take into account, which happens to be extremely dense. Even more surprising is that this is just a summary of the actual work and science that’s done with this report. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to read through the entire report. In class today and Tuesday we were treated with the presence of Doctor Troy Knight to help explain the science behind this report. It was comforting but not at the same time to know that even Troy can’t understand this summary in its entirety. It’s comforting in the fact that I don’t feel as ignorant not knowing what the report is talking about sometimes, but it’s also discomforting to know how complex the science is and how many sciences actually integrate together for this. In class, Troy explained some of the history of climate change and pointed out that we are actually in an ice age right now. All it takes for us to be in an ice age is having any amount of permanent ice (permafrost) somewhere on the planet all year (hence the term permafrost). Some nay-sayers take this at face value and argue that us releases CO2 and other GHG in the atmosphere is a good thing and helps prevent too much cooling. What doesn’t really make sense about that is the fact that in order for them to come to that conclusion they would have to acknowledge the fact that the Earth is warming by CO2 we put in the atmosphere, which in many cases they end up contradicting themselves. Another thing I found interesting about the report in particular was how it admitted the scientific certainty that not all information can be 100percent certain. I’ve talked about this before but I think it is so important, especially in the U.S. that we start accepting this study as part fact, but also fair warning. Sure thing’s may not be set in stone, in fact that’s why there is still hope, but not doing anything about this leaves it up to chance. Moreover, the language used to describe the data offers what the most certain and uncertain outcomes of climate change are going to be.