There are supposedly a lot of reasons to believe in climate change, but honestly, none of them ever really sold me. I’m not a scientist, but I got the feeling that this was one big conspiracy theory orchestrated by Obama and the Left. However, this December made me think — could climate change actually be happening?
It started as a normal Sunday morning, Dec. 13. I decided to go for a walk outside. As I stepped outside, the brisk air I expected … wasn’t. I spotted runners wearing tank tops; students had swapped their snow boots for shorts. As I started jogging too, I realized I was sweating. Sweating in December. That is ridiculous.
This dystopic December has forced me to do some research. If the high on Christmas Eve in Princeton, N.J. is 72 degrees, well, something must be wrong.
According to NASA’s comparison of atmospheric samples, carbon dioxide levels have been increasing steadily since the Industrial Revolution. In the past 650,000 years, the level has never reached as high as it is today. The global sea level has risen 17 centimeters in the last century. Global temperatures have continued to rise since 1880, and the alarming part is that from 2007-09, the Earth experienced a decline in solar output, but the temperature still continued to rise. The oceans have been getting warmer, the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica have decreased in mass, glaciers around the world are running away. Across the United States, cities and states have been hitting record high temperatures and floods.
Some people had mentioned El Niño as a reason against climate change. El Niño is natural, and also affects the temperature of the oceans, with warm water coming to the surface. In the most recent cycle, the air temperature rise briefly flattened during El Niño, so some scientists argued this was an indicator of the end of global warming. It isn’t. Human activity is unequivocally responsible for increasing the atmosphere’s load of carbon dioxide by more than 40 percent since the Industrial Revolution.
I used to think that climate change was not happening because the winters kept getting colder. How can there be a global warming if also the winters are worse? My younger sister saw more snow days than I had, hence global cooling.
There was science, too, to back up my inkling that “climate change” was just a scheme. The Earth’s climate has cycled throughout history — with and without humans. Most of these changes have been attributed to small variations in Earth’s orbit, which changes the amount of solar energy the planet receives, therefore changing global temperatures. As William Happer has written, “CO2 is not a pollutant. Life on earth flourished for hundreds of millions of years at much higher CO2 levels than we see today … warming and other supposedly harmful effects of CO2 have been greatly exaggerated.” If a Princeton professor wrote it, it’s true. So I thought carbon dioxide was a great thing.
The debate over climate change is both rooted in and causing economic debate: Some standards might rein in economic activity, but for the benefit of both planet and people. But that is not where the economic debate ends — that is the beginning. The countries affected most by climate change are those already at an economic disadvantage: Infectious disease is killing coffee plants across Guatemala, Costa Rica and Honduras; floods are drowning and displacing one-fifth of Pakistan, the strongest typhoon in history affected 11.3 million people in the Philippines.
Believe me, I would rather not believe in global warming. It was so much simpler for me to deny scientists and their questionable statistics. Even if all those climate scientists are wrong, I’ve realized that even if my opinion changes, it will already be too late.
Then again, it’s 43 degrees in Princeton today. So maybe it isn’t happening after all.
*This article is part of The Daily Princetonian's annual joke issue. Don't believe everything you read on the internet!*
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