That Used to Be Us by Friedman Thomas L. & Mandelbaum Michael

Author:Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [Mandelbaum, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

Honk If You Believe in Climate Change

In February 2010, after a particularly heavy snowfall in Washington, D.C., Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe’s daughter, Molly Rapert, her husband, and their four children built an igloo on the Mall near the Capitol in Washington. On one side they stuck a sign that said AL GORE’S NEW HOME. On the other they put one that read HONK IF YOU ♥ GLOBAL WARMING.

We would not have honked.

And neither would 99 percent of the scientists who have studied the problem. This is actually not complicated. We know that global warming is real because it’s what makes life on Earth possible. About this there is no dispute. We have our little planet Earth. It is enveloped in a blanket of naturally occurring greenhouse gases that trap heat and warm the Earth’s surface. Without those gases, our planet’s average temperature would be roughly zero degrees Fahrenheit. About that there is no dispute.

We also know that this concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing since the Industrial Revolution, because we can actually measure levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no other scientifically plausible explanation for the increase in greenhouse gases than the increased burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—that began with the Industrial Revolution and surged in the last three decades with the latest stage of globalization. When the Industrial Revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million by volume. By 2011 it was 390 parts per million. About that there is also no dispute.

This naturally had an effect on global average temperatures, which, again, we can measure. As we thickened the blanket of greenhouse gases around the Earth, it trapped more of the sun’s rays and the heat that they generated. As the Earth Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to tracking climate change, notes in its report for 2010:

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