Not looking for a political argument. I need facts. I am in no way a climate change denier, but I had a conversation with someone who told me the average increase is only 2°F over the past 100 years. That doesn’t seem like a lot and would support the argument that the climate goes through waves of changes naturally over time.
I’m going to run into him tomorrow and I need some ammo to support the climate change argument. Is it the rate of change that’s increasing that makes it dangerous? Is 2° enough to cause a lot of polar ice caps to melt? I need some facts to counter his. Thanks!
Edit: spelling
In: 597
Temperatures tend to exist on gradients. That is to say they have a smooth-ish transition from hot to cold or vice versa. One consequence of that is you can draw lines on maps approximately where the average temperature is a key point (for example, the melting point of ice). For simplification we’ll use latitude lines. Looking at the northern hemisphere, pick a latitude line (it doesn’t really matter if you’re not 100% accurate) where it looks like everything north of it has ice year-round. Increasing the average temperature will shift this line north somewhat.
What will happen when we shift this line north? First, miles and miles of ice sheets will melt (not to mention that less new ice will form both north of that line and in places where it’s not cold enough year-round). The same thing will happen to mountains as well. So these places are less icy, what’s the big deal? Well ice doesn’t just vanish, it has to go somewhere. Most of it will melt into the oceans. This will cause the oceans to rise somewhat. Now we can draw some new lines. Draw every coastline, everywhere in the world, and then move it in a bit (to account for the new ocean level). Every city that was on a coast before and that your lines now overlap will flood (most coastal cities are very low-lying). Some places are very flat and the new shoreline will be many miles inland (Florida for example will be nearly entirely underwater by current predictions [https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html](https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/tools/slr.html) if you want to see the map for yourself).
Remember how I said most of it will go into the ocean? What about the rest of it? Well some of it will end up in other waterways (rivers and lakes and so on) and some of it will end up in the air as water vapor. This might sound like a good thing, some of the consequences of hotter temperatures might be alleviated by more rain. There’s just one problem, the things that cause deserts to be deserts and rainforests to be rainforests don’t go away with climate change. This means that the planet’s extra rainfall will be concentrated in places that already get rain. This won’t be a huge deal for the rainforests, but in places that get intermittent rain there will be more and bigger storms. For the American Atlantic coast, the Carribean, the pacific coasts of east Asia and the Phillipenes this means more and bigger hurricanes (which gather moisture and heat from large swaths of the ocean so they are particularly effected by small temperature increases). For the American Midwest, more and stronger tornados.
All of this sounds pretty bad but maybe your friend doesn’t believe that we’re actually melting enough ice to matter. Let’s draw a line in the southern hemisphere now. You’ll notice that it’s mostly ocean, no ice to melt there until we get to Antarctica. Antarctica on the other hand has a lot of ice. More than you think. Antarctica is bigger than Europe, and covered in ice that averages over a mile in thickness ([https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/antarct/science/icesheet.jsp#:~:text=At%20its%20thickest%20point%20the,all%20the%20world’s%20fresh%20water](https://www.nsf.gov/geo/opp/antarct/science/icesheet.jsp#:~:text=At%20its%20thickest%20point%20the,all%20the%20world’s%20fresh%20water)). That’s 90% of the ice in the world. That means once your line starts crossing into Antarctica the effects on climate change will be literally 10x as fast as they were before Antarctic ice started melting. So when does that happen? it already has ([https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150880/antarcticas-brunt-ice-shelf-finally-breaks](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150880/antarcticas-brunt-ice-shelf-finally-breaks)).
We aren’t scared of 2 degrees because it makes every day that much hotter. We’re scared because we moved the line onto Antarctica, and there’s going to be a LOT of extreme weather and flooding because of that.
Alternately, for a quicker approach, look at these two lovely graphs. The first is average temperature over the last 2000 years (you can see exactly where the industrial revolution starts). The second is average temperature over the last 800,000 years. See how the range on the second one is a difference of less than 20 degrees? The 2000 year maps shouldn’t have a scale that’s anything like the 800000 year map but it does and we are definitely still going up rather than leveling off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000%2B_year_global_temperature_including_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_-_Ed_Hawkins.svg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EPICA_temperature_plot.svg
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