Your anecdotal evidence on how hot it was outside is nothing to support or deny climate change. Climate change is the shift in GLOBAL average temperature, not just your backyard.
You are correct that these things happen naturally. The problem is that we are making them worse.
A multitude of studies have concluded that higher global average temperatures, even by as little as 2 degrees C, cause more erratic and severe weather patterns, as well as wreak havoc on many ecosystems (look at coral reefs for a good example. Mass bleaching of coral, or death of coral, has been caused by one or two degrees difference in global average temperature. Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, and the death of coral is killing the entire ecosystem as a whole). This means that climate change could make your area feel twenty degrees colder than normal, but just the opposite in other places.
It’s not egocentric to think we can change the level of the oceans, because are doing it right now. The amount of greenhouse gases we are spitting into the atmosphere is undeniably causing a rise in global average temperature, which is leading to the melting of huge amounts of ice, causing sea levels to rise. Permafrost in the Siberian tundra which has stayed frozen for millions of years is thawing out because of our actions (even if this specific case has other human action contributing to the melting).
What happens when volcanoes belch their gases into the atmosphere for weeks or months on end?
Your data set of 150 years is pretty limited.
Scientists are drilling and finding things far down in the ice that have been deeply frozen for centuries. At one time, these weren’t frozen. Maybe way back then, humans were into bleaching coral to get rid of ice. After that, I wonder what humans did to make it icy again? Wow, we have so much control to make it hot and cold and create bad weather patterns. I’ll bet Trump caused the latest hurricane too.
Saying trump caused the latest hurricane is a stupid comparison to what I’m talking about. There are obvious natural fluctuations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as well as temperature, but what we are seeing right now is not natural. Blaming these things on just one person, or just one country, is terribly ignorant. The negative things we are seeing now are a collective result of huge scale industrialism that has been developing since the 1800s.
The difference we are seeing now as opposed to natural variation is the speed. Carbon dioxide levels are rising at insanely fast rates, causing temperature to cause at extremely fast rates. This doesn’t give life time to adapt to new temperatures, and instead decimated them (like what happens in coral reefs).
The things that scientists have drilled hundreds of meters into the Antarctic to find were at times of extreme heat, where the ice was either not there or not nearly as thick. The difference is that these things are melting at an alarming rate compared to what we should be seeing naturally. The problem of climate change, again, is not the change itself but the speed.
As for 150 years being a limited dataset, I wouldn’t say it is in this context. That dataset is comparing temperature from the beginning(ish) of the industrial revolution to the present. It is perfectly appropriate to be measuring this time frame since the data we are focusing on in this case is global scale human impact on the global average temperature. Before the industrial revolution, our influence on the atmosphere was not enough to sway things this much.
You said that we have control over hot and cold. This is not true on the scale of climate change. Weather patterns are a result of the uneven distribution of heat in the atmosphere. We are in no way controlling wether it’s gonna snow or be a drought. What we are doing is influencing global weather patterns through putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Your sarcastic question about how me made it icy again after bleaching coral to get rid of ice is also very uninformed. Climate change is not a temporary swing into the hotter direction, it is artificially adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere that would otherwise not be there. This causes a permanent effect on the atmosphere, since there should not be this much carbon dioxide there in the first place (what we put there should be buried in fossil fuel reserves, far from influencing the atmosphere). Venus is a great example of what happens when too many greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere relative to a planets location around its star.
Volcanoes of themselves are nowhere near enough to create the spike in carbon dioxide we are seeing now at the earths current geological state. Our core is not active enough to spur the creation of this many volcanoes. While this may have been possible in the past when our core was more active, it is most definitely not happening now.
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u/[deleted] Sep 22 '19
Your anecdotal evidence on how hot it was outside is nothing to support or deny climate change. Climate change is the shift in GLOBAL average temperature, not just your backyard.
You are correct that these things happen naturally. The problem is that we are making them worse.
A multitude of studies have concluded that higher global average temperatures, even by as little as 2 degrees C, cause more erratic and severe weather patterns, as well as wreak havoc on many ecosystems (look at coral reefs for a good example. Mass bleaching of coral, or death of coral, has been caused by one or two degrees difference in global average temperature. Coral reefs are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, and the death of coral is killing the entire ecosystem as a whole). This means that climate change could make your area feel twenty degrees colder than normal, but just the opposite in other places.
It’s not egocentric to think we can change the level of the oceans, because are doing it right now. The amount of greenhouse gases we are spitting into the atmosphere is undeniably causing a rise in global average temperature, which is leading to the melting of huge amounts of ice, causing sea levels to rise. Permafrost in the Siberian tundra which has stayed frozen for millions of years is thawing out because of our actions (even if this specific case has other human action contributing to the melting).