Climate Change Throughout The World

Climate change is one of today’s most hotly debated topic. Scientists for many decades have made supposed claims that current energy creation and reliance on fossil fuels will lead to inevitable changes to the planet. Today, climate change denial is still a popular to most of the world despite the mounds of evidence to support that it exists. The climate change issue suffers from being mismanaged by various parties through focusing on the wrong issues and the lack of true commitment from the general public, according to Sandra Steingraber.

As a kid who has cared about nature his entire life, and an avid modern environmentalist for four years and counting, this issue has been at the center of my psyche for quite some time. I have seen public perspective on this issue change before my eyes. From the original rejection of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie on “global warming” to personally marching alongside 300,000 people in our nation's capital to raise awareness on climate change. However, despite all of these avenues the issue is still spoken about as this distant idea that eventually will be a disaster. Many politicians and news networks speak of the need for slow implementation of policies and programs to right our environmental wrongs. The best way to paraphrase the common narrative of this issue would be to say, climate change is going to happen down the road, it will probably be bad and trying to fix it in the near future would be a good idea. That weak call to action shoves climate change onto the long to-do list of the leaders of our world. Not only does it not create the urgency needed to actually curb the effects of our environmental ignorance, but it does not accurately describe the threat of a changing climate. Treating this like a political issue will not allow for the rigorous changes needed to address such a problem in the timely manner that is required.

With an overwhelming number of scientists in agreement that climate change is anthropogenically caused and something needs to be done about it to reduce harmful impacts. Climate change research has removed itself from being a scientific and factual question and has evolved into a political one. There has been transnational agreements from the Kyoto Protocol to

Climate change has been a subject of discussion in the media for many years, supported with the use of arguments against oil polluting the environment and extreme scare tactics of Polar ice caps flooding civilians backyards. The issue has been ignored by the majority of lay people as seeming too complicated, and with all the conflicting information in the media in the past, who can blame them? However, scientifically, climate change and what perpetrates it is fairly simple to understand and society as a whole is beginning to come to a clear consensus on climate change. Thanks in part to more readily available forms of media and information, people have become cognizant of the fact that climate change is a legitimate problem which requires immediate amelioration. While this may seem melodramatic, society is realizing that climate change is an issue which can no longer be denied if the human race wishes to continue.

These last two election cycles have demonstrated the importance of climate change in relation to politics and the american people. What is unfortunate is that what seems to be a very crucial and real problem in our human survival, according to scientists, is being debated by people who do not have the scientific credentials to even discuss the science behind the reality of climate change. Those behind the skeptics, have funded a successful campaign against the reality of the facts and have introduce doubt into the sciences.

Climate change is one of the most controversial and ongoing topics in society today. Scientist and politicians alike all have opinions, but very often they are not in line with each other. 97% of climatologists agree that climate change is happening, as well as many of the large corporations in this field such as NASA, the Geological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of science. Still, these debates take place on sites such as climatedebatedaily.com or the worldwide conference that was held on June 6, 2015 that took place 79 countries. Both sides claim to have solid evidence that supports their theories, but it is evident to most scientists and corporations alike that the human race is creating our own destruction

Almost every argument I hear today discussing what we should do about climate change is inherently flawed because of their assumptions about the future. The current climate change model for the future assumes technology will not improve in any fundamental way for the next twenty or thirty years. Every argument which says climate change will be irreversible if we do not act now assumes we will only have our current technology at our disposal. I know for a fact technology advancements were not considered for these arguments because there is not a good way to predict what kinds of technology we will have in the future.

In the news report “Climate of Doubt”, PBS FRONTLINE investigates the reasoning behind the relationship climate change and politics has been fluctuating over the past few decades. In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth, a film that called for action against climate change, gained mass attention from the American Public. However, this rally for environmental sustainability created some undesirable consequences. There is a growing movement for anti-climate change by various CEOS, scientists, politicians, etc. that have been marketing against green movements. They claim that climate change was developed out of scientific malpractice, has no scientific backing, and the bad weather we experience is no more abnormal than it was a century ago.

There are many factors leading into why climate change is not as of a concern as people make it out to be. What is known as the ‘Climategate scandal,’ demonstrated that data used to show results of climate change was manipulated. In 2009, the leaked emails from a university exposed the scientists who have been using this false data to sway the public. Dr. James Hanson and other scientists were all involved in this scandal. They lowered past temperatures, changed recent temperatures and deleted data that proved them wrong. The emails also showed that the scientists attempted to censor any scientific journal that opposes their work. Alongside the scandal of 2009, there was another scandal in 2011 in which an organization attempted to hire an

Climate change is not an idea that just popped into existence within the last few years, it has been a political issue since the 1990's but the issue began to raise its head in the 1970's. There are many different factors that play into the greenhouse effect that has wrapped the planet. The most important cause is the gases in the atmosphere blocking heat from escaping. While carbon dioxide plays a part in the greenhouse effect, the most abundant is water vapor while the methane in the atmosphere is far more active than the carbon dioxide will ever be. Nitrous oxide, used in soil cultivation practices, and Chlorofluorocarbons, which are synthetic compounds of industrial origin, also play a part, but on a smaller scale (Global Climate Change:

Earth’s climate can be observed as an ever changing continuum throughout history. Just in the last 650,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat, the end of the last ice age occurring about 11,700 years ago. With climate change being a seemingly characteristic and even beneficial quality of Earth (the end of the ice age did mark the beginning of the modern climate era fit to sustain human civilization after all) it may be easy to disregard the significance of the current period of climate change our planet is in. However, most of the climate changes that occurred before the one beginning around 1950 were attributed to variations in the Earth’s orbit that affect the amount of solar energy received by it. The current

When thinking about the topic of climate change, my mind tends to go in twenty different places. I want to have a complete and honest understanding of climate change, but being such a dynamic topic with so many aspects, that may be hard to achieve. These aspects include scientific research, the economy, the government’s contribution, and society’s contribution to it. My prior knowledge of what exactly climate change and global warming is, comes from brief explanations in science classes and research that I have done on my own so I do not sound completely clueless while discussing this issue. From my understanding, the two sides of this debate are the politicians and the scientists. In my opinion, I will always stand on the environment’s side,

The response to climate change has proved inadequate on many levels. Partially this is because the issue requires scientific literacy that many simply do not possess, allowing leaders to underplay or ignore the danger since the public is not able to analyze the issues, and giving opportunity for groups such as gas companies to wield their considerable clout in favor of what benefits business instead of the environment. Furthermore, because of the large scale of climate change, the consequences are hard to see and the blame can be pushed around. Accordingly, climate change is highly-politicized, and cannot be addressed factually without upsetting one group or another. Whether or not climate change exists may be a difficult question to answer to the satisfaction of some individuals, but it is still not a political question; treating it as such means leaving the potential danger unexamined.

The primary cause of climate change is the human expansion of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is a natural occurrence, which NASA defines as “the warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from space” (NASA). During the greenhouse effect, heat from the sun passes through the atmosphere, which is made up of various gases. When the heat from the sun reaches the surface, some of it radiates away from Earth, back into space. However, some of the gases in the atmosphere, known as greenhouse gases, absorb this heat, preventing it from escaping (World Meteorological Organization). The greenhouse effect keeps the Earth at a habitable temperature. The World Meteorological Organization, or WMO, states that the greenhouse effect and

According to Adger (2010), the combined effect of climate change and limitations of resources is serving as a threat to the sustainability of the current social-economic systems and is poised to affect our way of life. Climatic change is more than global warming. The rise in temperatures is but part of the broader changes leading to extreme temperatures, drought, flooding, storms, rising sea levels, impacts on food production and a range of infectious diseases. Despite the awareness of the situation by the scientific community, it has been slow to react and implement measures to mitigate their effects. According to the club of Rome, the limited resources of the earth cannot support the earth’s exponential growth, due to the slow renewal. It estimates that we are currently using 50% more resources than the sustainable level, with a current projected population of above 8 billion to the sustainable one. Global warming and climate change is accelerating the issue, through reduction of the agricultural production and will effectively lead to physical damage that may lead to catastrophic effects like extreme weather patterns and sea level rise Adger (2010).