The Real Truth About Climate Change
One group of experts insists that the globe is warming, while another group of experts insists that the globe is cooling. So, which is it? What is the truth? How are we supposed to know what to believe? The answers to these questions might lie in the realization that we simply are NOT in a position to know. THIS might be the truth that we have to face.
Up Down And All Around
Some people find a DOWNWARD trend in global warming. In other words, some people find that the Earth might now be cooling a bit. Other people balk at this finding, as they present the findings of statistical experts who say that the global cooling trend is a mirage. These experts readily point out that EITHER an upward global temperature trend or downward global temperature trend appears, depending on where you establish starting points and ending points of reference in temperature data.
My impression of all this currently is that human beings simply have NOT been in existence for a long enough time to establish what really is going on. We humans are riding a very small interval in the entire geological history of the planet, where we must realize that “climate” has existed for at least two billion years of the five or so billion years of Earth's entire being. The human race is barely a blip in this temporal history, and we are trying to figure out, during an even smaller blip of a blip of time, what the climate is doing. Since we cannot step back far enough in space or in time to see ourselves in this big picture, we are able to speculate, with seemingly exact conceptions, any number of possibilities, where each of these possibilities can appear to be the correct possibility, depending on the perspective we might take.
Recent Years
The above picture shows three graphs:
- A graph of global average temperatures from the years, 1850 to 2011, a 61-year span where the trend line of global average temperatures slopes upward at an angle of about 16 angular degrees from the graph's horizontal.
- A graph of global average temperatures from the years1991 to 2011, a 20-year span where the trend line of global average temperatures still slopes upward, BUT only at half the incline (8 angular degrees from the graph's horizontal).
- A graph of global average temperatures from the years 2001 to 2011, a 10-year span where the trend line of global average temperatures now slopes ever so slightly DOWNWARD (a NEGATIVE 2 angular degrees below the graph's horizontal).
In other words, as we shorten the window of observation, from a 60-year span to a 20-year span to a 10 year span, we notice the trend line of global average temperatures moving from an upward angle to a flat or negative angle. This seems to indicate that global warming has been decelerating over (at least) the last thirty years.
A similar trend appears to have been occurring with glacial melting (see article at http://robertkernodle.hubpages.com/hub/GLACIERS-The-Cold-Hard-Facts-Of-Climate-Change).
Serious Questions
The above picture (a NASA graph with added notations in red) illustrates the temperature history of Earth's climate. Notice the cycling up and down of global temperatures over very long periods of time. Notice that a long upward trend in global temperature can contain a small downward "giggle" and that a long downward trend in global temperature can contain a small upward "giggle".
The questions we need to realize that we are NOT yet able to answer are these:
(1) Are we in a downward giggle of an upward warming peak? (red arrow "A" or "B")
(2) Are we in an upward giggle of an even larger downward cooling valley? (red arrow "C")
(3) Are we somewhere on the up side of a warming slope?
(4) Are we approaching a peak that starts us on the down side of a cooling slope?
Again, we have to consider these questions in spans of eons, NOT in spans of mere human generations, because these immense spans are the spans in which Earth's climate change truly operates. No human has lived long enough to answer these questions conclusively. And we cannot be certain that the human race will last long enough for any human to answer these questions.
One of the biggest questions is, "Are human beings NOW significantly influencing the directions of these events because of our introduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere through our industrial activities?"
In other Hubpages articles on this subject, I have answered this particular question, "No." Trustworthy sources of information continue to convince me that CO2 is NOT a problem in this regard.
