Cristian Garcia 3rd Period Jan 5, 2020

Climate change
The Station goes around the world in an hour and a half, which means it flies through fifty
minutes of day, followed by fifty minutes of night, endlessly repeating. I remember holding
onto a handrail on the outside of the Station, which was flying silently up the Atlantic, from
south to north, and as we moved toward Europe, I could see the terminator—the line
between night and day—rolling up over the horizon ahead of us. The terminator flicked
over us, and, in the deeper darkness ahead and below us, I could see a huge lit-up city,
glued to the curved Earth, sliding up over the rim of the world to meet me. The white sun
sank quickly behind us in a showy flurry of orange, pink, and red horizon bands, and then
we were suddenly in twilight, floating into the dark half of the world. I could see the
structure of the city, with its glowing heart, its network of roads and its halo of suburban
lights fading into the dark countryside. This process has propelled civilizations forward: art,
philosophy, engineering, and science all came from the cities where people interact,
discuss, argue, and push the human reach a little further.
In this century, for the first time in history, more than half of us live in cities, and most of us
in the affluent West are busy driving cars, flying from place to place, and heating and
cooling our houses and offices. The facts of climate change are straightforward: there’s
been a warming surge over the past hundred years, with a dramatic uptick in this new
century.
That melt, in turn, has been partly responsible for the three-inch rise in sea levels since
1992.
We are seeing the effects in the shrinking of the summer Arctic sea ice and the melting of
the Greenland glaciers.
All of this is placing quite a demand on the resources of our little home planet.
The global community of climate scientists, endorsed by their respective National
Academies of Science or equivalents, is solid in attributing the warming to fossil-fuel
emissions.
But the record—the reality—shows a steeply rising temperature curve which closely
matches the observed rise in carbon dioxide.
If you left the increase in carbon dioxide out of your calculations, you would see a wobbly
but, on average, level temperature trend from the eighteen-nineties to today.
Cristian Garcia 3rd Period Jan 5, 2020

Many climate-research groups around the world have calculated the various contributions
to climate change, including those not related to humans, like volcanic ash.
It has been shown repeatedly that it is just not possible to explain the recent warming
without factoring in the rise in anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Are we humans the cause of these changes? The answer is an emphatic yes. Humans are
the cause of the accelerating warming. You can bet your life—or, more accurately, your
descendants’ lives— on it. This is a perfect example of Orwellian Newspeak which also
flies in the face of three hundred years of scientific progress, in which intellectual argument
and conviction must be based on facts and substantiated theories, rather than personal
beliefs or biases.
As a result, many prominent politicians insist, and get away with insisting, that climate
change is a hoax, a mantra that has gained some credibility through sheer repetition.
As a scientist, I would like to think that the political discussion of climate change and how
to mitigate its worst effects would be sober and fact-based.
Climate deniers are also fond of saying that global warming is not resolved in science or is
“just” a theory.
Climate-change deniers in the United States have done a first-class job in spreading
confusion and misinformation. If nothing is done to reduce carbon emissions over the next
couple of decades, our climate models predict that there will be massive changes in the
global precipitation and temperature patterns, with huge effects on water and food
security, and dramatic sea- level rise.
This is why the signers of the international Paris climate agreement called for limiting the
rise of the global surface air temperature to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
levels. When we talk about why the climate has changed, and what the future climate is
likely to be, scientists use analyses and predictions that rest heavily on results from
computer models, which in turn rest on layers and layers of theory.
The science behind the predictions made by these climate models is not always easy to
explain, and this prompted me to think more about how scientists communicate what we
know to the wider community.
And there’s the rub—a lot of the confusion about what is known and unknown about the
changing climate can be traced to people’s understanding of the role of theory in science.
A good example is Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, which says that every physical
object in the universe exerts a gravity force field around itself, with the strength of that field
depending on its mass.
Cristian Garcia 3rd Period Jan 5, 2020

Einstein improved on Newton’s theory when it comes to large-scale astronomical

phenomena, but, for everyday engineering use, Newton’s physics works perfectly well,
even though it is more than three hundred years old.
Fundamentally, a theory in science is not just a whim or an opinion; it is a logical construct
of how we think something works, generally agreed upon by scientists and always in
agreement with the available observations.
The theory—one simple equation—does a superb job of explaining our observations of
how planets orbit around the sun, and was more than good enough to make the
calculations we needed to send spacecraft to the moon and elsewhere.