Climate change and debate

An interesting article about the amazing climate change humans are causing was published by the UNC Charlotte campus newspaper back in Spring 2014, but it’s worth re-visiting as our atmosphere once again reached 400 ppm CO2 concentration. The piece was published as a point-counterpoint discussion, but as many scientists (include myself) point out, science is not about considering all sides – it’s about considering what the evidence suggests. I wrote a letter in response to the viewpoint that climate change is no big deal. If the evidence from multiple experiments/studies suggests a single point is true, then that’s where the scientific community will tend towards when explaining that science. As the evidence builds and builds with no one finding counter-evidence, the conclusions become more and more robust*. If the evidence suggests mixed or nuanced results, then scientists will talk about that science as inconclusive and continue to try to design better experiments or get more data or both. Most importantly, perhaps, if counter-evidence arises repeatedly, scientific conclusions will change in response. Science is a beautiful, self-correcting process.

In Spring 2014, I sat down with a Niner Times reporter and Twitter friend Ed Averette and talked with him about how I see climate science, and how I talk about the science of climate change in my classroom (most prominently in ESCI 3101, Global Environmental Change). I had a lot to say, mostly because I had just returned from a wonderful conference called the Carolinas Climate Resilience Conference in April 2014, where I talked about Climate Change in the University Classroom (presentation here!), and I met some amazing outreach-oriented people (Kirstin Dow, Greg Carbone, Jim Gandy), and learned a climate change song that could be played on a dulcimer sung by this NPS Ranger. The article Averette wrote is available online and includes a figure I made for my class lectures.

Another Niner Times reporter, Louis Aiello, provided the (journalistic) opposing viewpoint that there is no need to panic when it comes to the present-day climate change and his article is available online as well. Both articles are worth reading since they echo the innate concern we have for our planet, but that at the same time, the problem can feel overwhelmingly large**. Aiello never spoke with me, or as far as I could tell, any expert in the field of climate science, so of course I agree more with the approach Averette used, and found myself strongly disagreeing with Aiello’s article. I wrote a letter to the Niner Times in response to Aiello’s article, and I wrote a shorter version of that letter as well for the print newspaper. I did this because I often think about this artificial public debate that exists in the face of a broad scientific consensus about many points regarding the present-day climate change, and I also think that scientists need to speak up when they know about a topic.

*Gravity is a good example. Go measure the acceleration if you want, but you’re likely to find the same thing any scientist will find. Acceleration due to gravity is 9.8 meters per second every second that an object falls. Thus, this is essentially a fact in our world, but it arose from evidence, not our gut feeling.

**This philosophy of how a single person drawing from a common resource scales up to major problems is known as the Tragedy of the Commons, which has been spoken about eloquently by many many people, including wikipedia.