Global Climate Change is a Fact

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Climate change, or global warming, has become a more prevalent issue in our society as the years pass by. Science is making great leaps and advances towards predicting future correlations between nature and human events. Many lines of evidence have been presented to the public to prove that climate change is and has been in progress for years now. The five most prevalent of these lines of evidence are: radiative forcings, climate models, correlations, observed changes in climate systems above the norm, and unnatural changes in the earths natural variation such as rising ocean temperatures and levels.

What are radiative forcings? As stated in the IPCC report of 2013, radiative forcings (RFs) quantify the changes in energy fluxes caused by changes in these drivers (natural and anthropogenic substances and processes that alter Earth’s energy budget) for 2011 relative to 1750. Positive RF leads to surface warming and negative RF leads to surface cooling. According to the data collected from numerous sources for the IPCC, the total radiative forcing is positive, which has led to a large uptake in energy by the climate systems. The largest known contributor to the positive total radiative forcings is caused by the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, since 1750.

Climate models have been there to support the claims and theories of climate change. Climate models reproduce observed continental scale surface temperature patterns and trends over many decades, as reported by the IPCC, and have improved since the assessment report #4 (AR4). These observations include those of rapid warming since the 20th century and cooling immediately following volcanic eruptions. Climate models are able to show us that al...

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...s) are the only ones that need to change for the better.

Works Cited

"Glaciers | Weather Underground." Glaciers | Weather Underground. Weather Underground, n.d. Web. 07 Mar. 2014. .

Guggenheim, D. (Director). (2006). An inconvenient truth: A global warning [DVD]. Hollywood: Paramount.

IPCC, 2013: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Stocker, T.F., D, Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S. K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M. Midgley (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

Otto, Shawn Lawrence. “Democracy in the Age of Science.” 2009, St. Peter, Minnesota. Keynote Address.

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