The simple answer to that question is because it’s really important. But simple answers are rarely complete ones. A more complete answer might be that global warming is important to lots of different people for lots of different reasons. There is a boatload of information out there in the media all the time about global warming. Some of it is factual. I love facts. Facts ARE. There is no room for interpretation with facts. Two plus two equals four, everywhere, all the time. Atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons. All atoms. Disco was a mistake. Absolutely. Facts are facts and they are the same for everyone. Actually, that last example is not so much a fact as an observation but the other two are facts, for sure.
Source: NASA: Left-Mike McMillan/USFS, center – Tomas Castelazo / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0, right – NASA.
Some of the information you made find about global warming, however, is not factual. Some of it is just lies and nonsense strewn about the Internet like so much electronic cow manure by conspiracy theorists and other loonies of that nature. Most of the time, that’s easy enough to spot and equally easy to ignore. It’s everything in between the facts and the outright lies that cause the trouble. It’s the information that seems like it SHOULD BE or COULD BE true, but you don’t know if it is, or not. It sounds reasonable and the source seems like it should be reliable, but should you accept it and use it to formulate your own thoughts on the issue? This is one reason why it is so very, very important that everyone knows the basic concepts of science. It’s harder to pull the wool over someone’s eyes if they have some idea of what you’re talking about.
So, let’s start with this: the climate of the Earth has warmed enough over the past century to cause significant issues with sea levels, ocean acidification, precipitation patterns and ecosystem distributions, among other things. That is a fact. It is determined by simple measurements and is not subject to opinions. There is a vast amount of data that supports this fact and no reliable data that does not. So, why the argument, you may ask? The seemingly endless debate about global warming is not about whether or not it is occurring. No reasonable person denies that it is occurring, because no reasonable person can deny it. It just is. What people argue about is whether the phenomenon is man-made and if it matters.
Before we go any further, let’s do a quick review of the scientific basis of the “greenhouse effect”, which is the driving force behind global warming. Much of this we’ve already touched on before. The sun is the ultimate source of all the energy on Earth, with the exception of nuclear forces. Were it not for the energy the Earth receives from the Sun, 92,000,000 miles away, our planet would be a barren, lifeless chunk of rock and ice. The Earth is just the right distance from the Sun that Earth is in the “Goldilocks zone”, where it’s not so hot our surface water boils away and not so cold all the surface water is frozen. The Earth is constantly absorbing energy (which we feel as heat) from the Sun during the day, and constantly radiating energy back out into space at night, like a pan cooling on the stove once the burner is turned off. If we didn’t have our atmosphere, we would heat and cool very quickly. One of the things our atmosphere does is control how much energy (and what type of radiation) passes through to the surface of the planet and how much and how quickly that energy radiates back into space. There are many gasses (along with dust and so forth) in the atmosphere, some of which have an effect on how energy moves in and out and some of which don’t. Two of the most important moderating gasses in the atmosphere are water vapor and carbon dioxide, which is why they are called “greenhouse gasses”—they act like the glass in a greenhouse. The more water vapor and CO2 there is, the more energy (heat) is reflected back toward the surface, rather than radiating out into space. This is also a fact—it’s been known for ages. Water vapor causes the majority of the greenhouse effect (between 50% and 70%), but water vapor doesn’t really matter much in the grand scheme of global warming because, although there are times when it’s cloudy or humid (when there is more water vapor in the air) in some particular place, if you look at the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere, over the entire planet for any significant period of time, the amount of water vapor averages out to be fairly constant. CO2 makes up only about 0.04% of the atmosphere, but it is responsible for about 25% of the greenhouse effect. Although the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is very small, the problem arises from the fact that there is about 40% more CO2 in the atmosphere now than there was about 250 years ago. This is also a measurable, reliable fact. That means that CO2 is now causing 40% more greenhouse effect now than it did then, which means that somewhere around 10% more of the sun’s energy is being retained by the atmosphere now than was the case in 1750. The result is that the average temperature is now about 1.8 degrees higher now than it was in 1750, and at current rates, the temperature will be almost 4 degrees higher in 2050. That will have very serious consequences.
So the facts and the scientific basis of the greenhouse effect are solid and well-known. Where is the argument? The argument is about how much of global warming is actually anthropogenic (caused by man). The 40% increase in the amount of CO2 since 1750 is significant, both in terms of the amount of CO2 that represents (billions of tons) and the fact that 1750 is a good date to use for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was when manufacturing went from a (generally) small-scale, human-powered activity to a large-scale, steam-powered activity. That steam was (and still is, for the most part) produced by burning coal and other fossil fuels. Burning of fossil fuels (or pretty much anything else) releases CO2 as a waste product. Burning is actually the chemical process of oxidation, or adding oxygen, which is why fires require oxygen. The oxygen in the air combines with the carbon and hydrogen in the fuel to create CO2 and water, releasing energy in the process (remember the article on making and breaking chemical bonds?). Just for a little perspective on how much CO2 is created by burning–a gallon of gasoline weighs a little more than 6 pounds. When you burn that gas in your car, that one gallon of gas produces about 20 POUNDS of CO2. The extra mass comes from the oxygen that is added in the chemical reaction. If you have a 20 gallon tank, you produce 400 pounds of CO2 every tank you burn. You multiply that by 250 million cars on American roads, and the result is A LOT. Similarly, burning a ton of coal at a power station releases almost 3 tons of CO2. The average power plant burns about 4000 tons of coal A DAY. That is about 12000 tons of CO2 produced by each of the almost 600 power plants in the US alone, every day–around 7 MILLION tons of CO2 added to the atmosphere just by coal-fired power plants in the US. The world-wide amount is about 4 or 5 times that. Human activity results in about 38 BILLION (with a B) tons of CO2 being added to the atmosphere every year.
The interesting thing to me is that, in my opinion, how much of global warming is related to human activity doesn’t really matter at all. That the Earth is warming is a FACT. That there are already consequences to that and that the consequences will get worse is a FACT. It doesn’t matter if 90% or 20% of global warming is due to our use of fossil fuels (and the amount is much closer to 90 than 20). We can’t do anything about cyclical, naturally-occurring changes in climate and we can’t stop volcanos from erupting and spewing millions of tons of all sorts of stuff, including greenhouse gasses, into the air. However, what we CAN change is how much CO2 we put into the air through our activities and, given the consequences of a warming climate, we have to do whatever we can to reduce our impact.
I know that there are a lot of people reading this whose livelihoods depend on coal mining. My grandfather was an electrician in the mines and my dad worked in the mines for a while when he was young. My brother-in-law is a retired underground miner. Coal was the engine of the economic life of the region I live in (and the rest of the nation, too) for generations. I get it. I really do. The fact of the matter, though, is that there are twice as many people on this planet now than there were 50 years ago, using 5 times more energy. We have over 8 billion people living in an increasingly industrialized society. We cannot pretend it doesn’t matter. We MUST do what we can to first slow, then reduce, then finally eliminate our use of fossil fuels, over time. Our Earth is vast and its ability to absorb the things we do to it is similarly vast, but it is not unlimited. We’ve gotten to the point where we can mess things up faster than the Earth can heal.
New technologies, such as renewable energy, to help combat our changing climate are not some “woke” conspiracy. Even if it was, against whom or what would the conspiracy be directed? Science and technology move on. What was once the norm is now history. Two hundred and fifty years ago, information moved at the speed of a rider on a horse, or maybe that of a sailing ship. Now it moves at the speed of light. One hundred and fifty years ago, we got around in wagons drawn by horses. Then came automobiles. Some fought against cars, because there was a whole system built around horses—stables, buggy makers, farmers producing feed, even street cleaners in some cities. The coming of the car threatened all of that, and it made the future uncertain and scary. People like what they are used to and tend to fear change. Fear can be a powerful weapon.
This is another argument that should resonate with people today, because it’s one of the arguments people consistently use against electric vehicles: people argued that cars would never replace horses because we didn’t have the infrastructure (roads, fueling stations, auto mechanics, tire manufacturers, etc.) to support cars. But, guess what? We built the infrastructure, and we built it very quickly. By the way, many automobiles in the early days were actually electric, running on batteries. Then as now, electric vehicles were easier and cheaper to build and more reliable than gas-powered cars. Those early electric cars didn’t disappear until oil production and gasoline refineries and distributors became common. What is happening now with regard to energy production and usage is just another chapter in a developing story. Things change. Old technologies are replaced by new ones that are better and more efficient.
In summary, our climate is most certainly changing, and as it changes, there are going to be continuing consequences for severe weather events, agriculture, wildfires, sea level, impacts on sea life caused by acidification of the oceans and more. Some of that change, likely the majority of it, is due to our use of fossil fuels. However much of the change is our fault, we must do whatever we can do to start limiting our contribution to climate change because the consequences and costs of inaction are going to be much, much worse than the costs of transitioning to new technologies.