“Catastrophe happens when people underestimate the impact of something bad on the horizon and overestimate the cost it would take to change.” –Steven L. Smith, NASA Astronaut, Environmentalist

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.” ― Elie Wiesel

It’s bad. We have the power to change it, but it’s pretty bad. The somber truth about the state of our earth in regards to climate change is that it is:

Directly linked to human causes

Going to get worse in the foreseeable future

Very possibly an existential threat to humanity

The consensus agreement from multiple studies in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that over 97 percent of actively publishing scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities. Here is a list of over 200 worldwide scientific organizations in agreement that climate change is and has been caused by human actions.

In future topics, we will show why 97% of scientists agree that climate change is here, happening, and caused by humans. Keep in mind that even the widely-accepted Theory of Natural Selection only has about an 87% consensus among scientists according to a 2009 Pew Study! If you were on a cliff with a 97% chance that stepping off would result in slamming bedrock, would you do it? Of course not. As a species, we are careening towards the edge of a precipice, with limited time to slow down. Like the driver of a runaway car with only milliseconds to slam the brakes before crashing, we too must reverse our climate change momentum before we plunge our planet and ourselves into a free-fall that has a 97% chance of no recovery. 97 percent of actively publishing scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” -Aldous Huxley

Since the industrial revolution, technology and manufacturing have skyrocketed, with each generation out-doing the last. Ideas like coal-fired furnaces and gas-powered engines were nothing short of brilliant for their time period. Their robust power at cheap cost was marvelous, even, up until only a few decades ago. Undeniably, coal and gas were the cornerstones that society rested on; the amount of energy per molecule for these fuel sources was higher than any other contemporary fuel and they were both cheap to extract. However, these machines all have an unavoidable byproduct: emitting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Greenhouse gases cause heat to get trapped in the atmosphere, gradually heating the planet. Imagine being in a small, enclosed room, crammed with people breathing out hot air. With no way for the heat to escape, the windows fog and the heat becomes unbearable. The earth is our room, and the atmosphere, thickened by CO2, is making it harder and harder for heat to leave our planet. The visual below helps illustrate this effect.

The walls of a greenhouse work like Earth’s atmosphere, trapping just enough heat for the plants to thrive. The increasing amounts of CO2 in the air has the same effect as making the greenhouse walls thicker, therefore trapping more heat and baking the plants inside.

A direct way to meter climate change, then, is by measuring the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In any setting where motors and engines are powered by combusting a carbon-based fuel source (gas, petroleum, oil, coal), carbon dioxide emerges as a by-product.

An example of a combustion reaction. Oxygen and a fuel (here, methane, but this could also be gasoline, propane, butane, etc.) combine to give off heat, water, and carbon dioxide.

This is not a liberal viewpoint trying to dissuade you from the idea of “clean coal”, which, frankly, is as scientifically feasible as trying to power our society with zombie windmills ( click here for a funny explanation of what a zombie-apocalypse power grid would look like). Rather, the truth that combusting fossil fuels will produce carbon dioxide is as deeply based in chemistry as the fact that water kept at 32 degrees Fahrenheit will freeze solid.

As a species, our total industrial practices in the last 200 years have skyrocketed in volume, growing so fast that only in recent years have we come to understand the effects of the last two centuries worth of combusting carbon based fuel sources. The effects weren’t instant, but hundreds of years of burning fossil fuels has caught up with us:

“Humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution began” -NASA

For those that don’t spend their mornings checking what the daily CO2 concentration is, this one-third increase in the last two centuries is absolutely and completely unprecedented. To help visually demonstrate this trend, here is a NASA graph recording atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last 800,000 years:

This was measured by finding ancient air bubbles trapped in ice samples that still have the same air composition today as when they were first caught in their frozen prison millennia ago. Once an air sample is possessed, finding the composition of it is both straightforward and accurate.

This graphic paints a vivid, somber picture about the reality of CO2 emissions. PPM is the standard unit for measuring concentrations of substances in gases or liquids. A CO2 level of 300 ppm means there are 300 molecules of CO2 per one million molecules of air. The current level of over 400 ppm and rising is higher than any amount in human history and corresponds directly with when we accelerated our burning of fossil fuels. Now, to address why we are here today reading articles about climate change: what does this rise in carbon dioxide levels mean for us and how has the planet responded? More greenhouse gases in the atmosphere cause higher temperatures, more extreme (and frequent) weather events, and a cascading list of other negative effects we are only now fully realizing. The recent increase over 300 ppm, or parts per million, shows “a remarkably constant relationship with fossil-fuel burning” and can, with near certainty, be due to “the simple premise that about 60 percent of fossil-fuel emissions stay in the air.”

“Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”



In Iceland, scientists just commemorated a eulogy plaque to Ok, their first iceberg gone to climate change. The plaque also states “445 ppm”, a reference to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere at the time the iceberg melted, which, if you look back at the previous graph, is already higher than any carbon dioxide amount in recorded history. As you can imagine, as icebergs melt, oceans around the world have begun to rise. More severe extremes in weather patterns are becoming the norm rather than the exception. According to Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies:

“The warmest five years in the record are just the last five years.” -Gavin Schmidt

The last five years hold more records than just the five hottest. The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has been keeping track of climate disasters and record the economic and societal impacts that severe weather events have. A particularly alarming metric is number of events that constitute over $1 billion of losses in a year. Adjusted for inflation, the last five years have had double the number of $1 billion events than the historical average:

From 1980 to 2018, the annual average is 6.3 events; the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2014–2018) is 12.6 events.” -NCEI

2018 shattered the all-time record for most cumulative damage due to weather events. With 16 major events costing over $1 billion each, 2018 saw $306.2 billion of damages. The previous record was occurred in 2005, which suffered the impacts of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. Even that historically tragic year cost only two-thirds of what we pay for in a normal year today.

Some brush off increasing carbon dioxide levels and frequent weather disasters as coincidental. Skeptics point out that our planet goes through cycles of global heating and cooling and we’re merely in a heating period. In part, this is true, as the radiation energy from the sun (the heat that we feel here on Earth) does actually vary in time. When the sun is “hotter”, small parts of Earth heat slightly, and vice versa. However, in the past one hundred years, the sun’s emitted energy has varied slightly while the global average temperature has steadily risen. As shown in the graph below, the planetary temperature (the red line) relatively followed the sun’s irradiance levels (yellow line), up until about 1950, when it shot upward independent of the solar energy hitting Earth. The scary part? That is the exact same year that CO2 broke above 300 ppm for the first time in human history (see the previous graph)!

While the average solar irradiance varied slightly, the global average temperature has skyrocketed. The temperature increase is consistent with the timeline of CO2 emissions increasing over 300 ppm.

Solar radiation only accounts for changes in confined areas. These micro “temperature cycles” cause specific parts of the globe to heat up or cool significantly more than other surrounding areas or more so than what that area typically experiences. A famous example of this is Central England’s “Medieval Warming Period” from about 900-1300 CE followed by the “Little Ice Age” from 1400 to 1850.

During these two periods, Britain saw average regional temperature changes of only about 0.3 degrees and 0.6 degrees. However, these miniature eras of temperature change were not consistent over the entire globe! Both eras affected England and parts of Northern Europe but the average temperature in the Northern Hemisphere, let alone the entire world, did not change.

Keep in mind, these two well-known heating and cooling time periods were significant enough to be labelled “eras” of irregular temperature and drastic change. Fast forward back to present times. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international body of scientists started by the UN to research climate change, has released a report stating that humans have already caused temperatures to rise a full degree, with more expected to come.

Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels, with a likely range of 0.8°C to 1.2°C. Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Thus, the current forecast of a 1.5 degree increase happening both simultaneously and globally should cause serious concern. Human activities have already caused a one degree rise and we’re seeing the worst weather disasters on record. Icebergs like Ok are already melting, extreme, deadly weather events are becomingly alarmingly more regular, and coastal cities are subject to flooding. Do we really want to wait and see what two degrees will do? It’s time to learn what we can do about it. It’s time for us to stop the degrees rising.