May 15th, 2019
Written by - Anna Beck '22
*Note - The source which this piece was derived from was self-published, which poses a concern about it's legitimacy. As the editor, I must give a voice to all those who wish to share, despite a questionable source. The opinion presented in this source is generally a minority when it comes to other climate specialists/scholars, so please keep this in mind when reading.
Many are aware that there is an impending crisis here on Earth. The temperatures are rising. The winters are getting harsher. The sea level is getting higher. The scientists are freaking out. The New York Times, National Geographic, and countless other news providers have been cranking out article after article warning of the impending cataclysm which, thanks to a recently released report compiling 6,000 studies, is predicted to happen within the next twelve years. The oceans will grow so much that many areas of land will become completely uninhabitable and drought may ruin agricultural lands. All the blame for these problems is directed at humans. Humans are ruining the world. The political system is corrupt; it’s their fault, many say, and we are powerless. That is the truth. However, we cannot be sure that the extreme change in climate is completely the result of human action. We cannot be sure that the human race has the power to fix everything. Part of the change is possibly caused by humans, but there is so much we do not know about climate change.
Roy Spencer is a NASA scientist and meteorologist. Of many works on climate change, his most recent is an eBook called Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People, where he explains that what we know about Earth right now may be completely wrong. In the graph below, Spencer examines the change in temperature over the past 2,000 years:
According to the graph, the warming trend is not a massive diversion that appears as soon as humans start to industrialize the world, but instead it is nearing the peak temperature of what appears to be a millennial fluctuation of Earth’s temperature. However, we can only see the past two cycles. We have no idea what the temperature was like before this time. One might ask, “What about the coral reefs? If the temperature rose to be much higher about 1,000 years ago, just as it appears to be rising now, why aren’t our coral reefs already dead?” We do not know the answer to this question. It is possible that there were more coral reefs 1,000 years ago than there are now and that most of the coral back then died from the heat and what we have now is what was left over. (We do know that coral grows very slowly, so it could not have all grown back over 1000 years).
This goes back to the question: Are humans really a big factor in climate change at all? Are our actions causing the Earth’s temperature to rise in a way that is out of the ordinary? We do not know if it is enough to send the Earth’s possible “millennial cycle” off its regular course. It is possible that we could. This could be the one cycle where the climate becomes out of control because of us. Yet we have no data to say whether or not this could be the one “millennial cycle” that will raise temperatures higher than they ever were. Even if humans were nonexistent, this could still be that one really warm cycle. We do not know what will happen. We could continue with the cycle shown in the graph above and have a very cold period in about 500 years, or these 2,000 years that we have a record of could be an outlier in the great span of Earth’s existence and we may return to totally different climate pattern in the next 100 years. We cannot predict the future.
The data referenced in Spencer’s book could be wrong as much as any other meteorologists’ and scientists’ data could be wrong. Yet right now, we have found nothing to prove that any theory is absolutely correct. We simply do not know. Spencer’s data does not mean that a global catastrophe is not plausible. If temperatures rise, as scientists predict, the seas will still rise, the ice will still melt, and the human race will be affected in many parts of the world along with the animals. The results of rising temperatures will be the same and, thus, an imminent disaster is still possible. Our generation will still have a climate flux and the many problems it will cause here on Earth to deal with and fix. What Spencer’s data might mean, however, is that we humans may have no power over the climate. Even if we stop all emissions, use renewable energy, erase the carbon footprint… the climate can still change. Or it might not. We, as humans, have no way of knowing.
What we do know is that we are still ruining our planet. Deforestation and habitat destruction, pollution in all its many forms, from water to light to air, degradation of ecosystems through overhunting and invasive species, overconsumption, and countless other forms of human destruction are still altering and poisoning Earth and its many inhabitants. It seems right to save what we can. We may never know what will happen next, but we can still make an effort to take care of the planet we still have.
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