Climate Change Essay

Over the course of recent history, much concern has been raised over the industrial revolution and the potential climate changes that it might be causing. It has been stated by global warming theorist that C02 emissions caused by human technologies are causing the world to warm, which will cause negative climate changes. The Earth may be experiencing a global warming trend and climate change; however, the process of climate change is outside of human control because human activity can barely account for any of the C02 level increases. Attempts to reduce human C02 emissions is needlessly expensive, and will have a negligible role in preventing or slowing any climatic changes such as global warming or an impending ice age. People must be prepared to adapt to the climatic changes that occur, because it is unlikely that human intervention will postpone them or limit the impact of their arrival.

For the past few million years, the Earth’s climate has been changing in a periodic fashion between warming trends and deep freezes. The levels of C02 in the atmosphere tend to show a close correlation with these temperature changes. Evidence for this on a timescale of millions of years can be seen using the Geocarb III model, about 800 million years ago, the C02 saturation was nearly 7000 parts per million (Berner, "Geocarb III: A Revised Model of Atmospheric CO2 over Phanerozoic Time"). Today the C02 concentration seems to be increasing but is still below 500 parts per million ("Scripps CO2 Data - Mauna Loa Observatory", 2014). The entire process of these changes in temperature and C02 occurred without any human intervention. The human species has only been in existence on a timescale of thousands of years and cannot remain on Earth for an i...

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...the atmosphere to support life as we know it. The Vostok ice core samples allow us to look back about 450 thousand years, and it can be seen that C02 levels naturally rise and fall just as they are doing now (Petit, "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica"). Since it is still unknown how the climate will be affected if the C02 rising trend is reversed, human intervention might actually cause the Earth’s climate irreprehensible harm. It is of the utmost importance that extreme care is taken by humanity when deciding how to approach the issue of global warming; even the slightest lapse in judgment due to ignorance could spell disastrous consequences for our future. Even something as simple as misappropriation of government funding could distract our attention away from the proper way to deal with climate change.