The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
Most people don’t realize it, but "black carbon" or soot – the same stuff that dirties up chimney flues and car mufflers – is a significant contributor to global warming. Today’s best estimates place it next in line behind the greenhouse gases CO2 and methane (see Table 2.13 in the IPCC report).
Soot particle under a microscope. Credit: D.M. Smith, University of Denver.
The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
Stephen Colbert once quipped, "It’s not that I don’t believe in climate change, it’s that I don’t believe in climate. Have you ever heard anyone say, "How’s the climate?" No! They say, "How’s the weather?""
People often confuse climate and weather. They wonder how scientists can reliably predict climate 50 years from now when they can’t predict the weather a few weeks from now. The answer is that climate and weather are different, and it’s easier to predict climate than weather.
With all that’s going on in the world, it’s easy to miss weather events. So you may not have noticed that U.S. weather patterns the last few months have been quite extreme and worrying.
What is needed now is a strong, sustained, and well-coordinated effort between governments at all levels, businesses, civic institutions, and individuals to adopt policies, programs, and practices that accelerate the adoption of clean, efficient energy choices. The costs of delay are high. For every year of delay in beginning significant emissions reductions, global concentrations of heat-trapping gases rise higher and the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change becomes more difficult and more costly to achieve.
From Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast [PDF 8MB], prepared by the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment Synthesis Team. July 2007.
For more on the toll of global warming in the Northeast, visit our New York City page.
This is the final installment of a five-part series by Bill Chameides on How We Know Humans Cause Global Warming.
1. A 175-year-old Puzzle
2. What Chemistry Tells Us
3. Causes of Past Climate Change
4. The Medieval Warming Period
5. The Only Explanation Left
Compared to 100 years ago, the temperature of the atmosphere is warmer. No one disputes that. And no one disputes that an extra source of heat must be causing it – that’s a basic law of physics. But how do we know that the source of the heat is increasing levels of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and deforestation?
So far in this series I’ve described how the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and global warming was discovered, how carbon isotopes prove that rising CO2 concentrations are from the burning of fossil fuels, and how the orbital shifts that cause ice ages cannot explain our recent warming.
That certainly suggests that global warming is caused by increased CO2 from burning fossil fuels, but how can we be sure?
The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
In March of this year, British TV Channel 4 aired a 72-minute diatribe called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The program is filled with old data, data taken out of context, data misattributed, and general misinformation, and at the time it aired we thought it not worth responding to.
But people keep mentioning it, so here are the program’s main arguments and why they’re wrong. Now the next time someone brings this up, you’ll have the facts to give them.
