We know a lot about the climate

As part of a great piece debunking climate change denier strategy #2 “exaggerate the uncertainty” Dana Nuccitelli has a nice brief on the key facts that we do know about climate change (with supporting links):

First of all it’s important to note that while there will always be uncertainties associated with any area of scientific research, we have learned a lot about how the Earth’s climate functions.  It’s important to sometimes take a step back and look at the big picture.  We know that:

• The Earth is warming
• Global warming has not slowed (Figure 1)
• Humans are increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere
• Human greenhouse gases are increasing the greenhouse effect
• The increased greenhouse effect has caused more warming than we’ve observed(meaning that the net effect of non-greenhouse gas influences like aerosols is one of cooling Figure 2)
• Global warming will accelerate unless we seriously reduce greenhouse gas emissions
• The net result of this global warming will be bad, quite possibly even catastrophic
  
  Land, atmosphere, and ice (LAI) heating (red) data from Church et al. (2011), 0-700 meter ocean heat content (OHC) increase (light blue) and 700-2,000 meter OHC increase (dark blue) data from Levitus et al. (2012). 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 28th, 2012 at 2:09 pm. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with climate change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.