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
Imagine you have a teacup full of water that you want to raise by 2°F. You could probably do that by holding a lighter under it. Not a lot of energy. Now imagine you want to raise a pot of water by 2°F. A gas stove could do it in about the same time. That’s a lot more energy though. What about a bathtub? To raise a whole bathtub of water by 2°F, the lighter and the gas stove wouldn’t be enough energy. You’d need a pretty large fire. That’s a *lot* of energy.
Now… think of how much energy you’d need to raise an entire planet 2°F. That’s how much extra energy is within the system.
A good way to introduce it to beginners is:
2 degrees hotter in the city isn’t bad, but two degrees hotter body temperature already puts you in an very uncomfortable fever. The earth is just as sensitive. Heat is energy, and at the scale of the earth, the temperature change means a massive amount of energy that affects “normal operations”
So water allows light to pass through it, which means the oceans heaat up from the bottom up. This is the opposite from land, which heats only the top layer of dirt and material and it cools down very quickly.
So with the oceans heating from increase on global tempreture, it means the salinity (salt level) and acidity is changing rapidly. The smallest organisms in the ocean, zoo and phytoplankton, cant survive these rapid changes and are at risk of collapsing. They are the primary food source at the bottom of the food chain in the ocean, so everything will collapse and we face a global marine collapse.
Protein from fish is a major food source for the majority of people on the planet. Hungry people topple governments.
So yeah, small changes have devastating effects.
I really hate questions in the form of “what can I say to win this argument?” You shouldn’t be worrying about winning arguments about something before you even understand it yourself.
How do we know what the average global temps were 20,000 years ago? Or even 2000 years ago? I’m assuming carbon dating of some sort, but down to such an exact amount?
Edit: schpelling
The difference between a continent being under 200 feet of ice or being a desert full of firestorms is about 4 to 5 degrees Celsius.
So 2 degrees is huuuuuuge.
at -3* boston was under a mile thick glacier, and water levels were so low you could walk across the english channel or the bering strait.
so if that’s your comparison between -3 and 0, think about what the difference between 0 and +3 looks like…
I’m not an expert in complexity theory but small changes in complex, interconnected systems, can lead to massive chain reactions that don’t scale linearly. There are many systems where a small incremental increase in the input leads to exponential increases in the output.
Small changes in micro environments can lead to large macro changes. Many systems behave this way.
If it was 70° every day for a year, it’s 70° on average.
Increase two consecutive weeks by 50° to 120° and the average across the year is now ~72°, only 2° warmer.
It doesn’t warm uniformly.
A small average increase in temperature worldwide is a MASSIVE increase in “trapped” energy in the system, energy that can drive storms, rise sea levels, melt ice etc etc
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