Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt Against Global Warming Remain High Despite Pressing Evidence

Although the science has been proven for decades, there is still a lot of misinformation concerning global warming. Let's go through some common and relevant issues relating to global warming and their replies in the sections below.

Is Global Warming Real?

(Photo : Photo by MATHILDE BELLENGER/AFP via Getty Images)

Is global warming caused by climate change, or does the weather cause it?

We must recognize that climate change, not weather, is the primary driver of global warming. Climate change occurs on a timeline of years, decades, and millennia, whereas weather occurs on a timescale of days.

Weather caused the huge frost in Texas last winter and the recent heat waves in California. Weather refers to a single heat wave, hurricane, or tornado outbreak. Climate change is to blame for the Western United States' twenty-year drought. Climate change/global warming would have to be blamed for the retreat (melting) of 90% of the world's alpine glaciers in the last 200 years.

Also Read: UN Promotes Cycling to Reduce Greenhouse Gases Emissions

Global Warming

What causes global warming, and what can be done about it? The "greenhouse effect," according to scientists, is what causes global warming.

The greenhouse effect is named after greenhouses, composed of glass, and rely on light to remain warm in the winter. You have directly experienced the greenhouse effect if you have climbed into your automobile after sitting in the sun and noticed how warm it is and how hot the seats are.

Visible Energy

Because visible (shortwave) energy from the sun is transparent, it goes through the automobile windows and heats the seats and interior, which absorb the shortwave radiation. The heated seats and interior's longwave infrared radiation cannot flow back through the windows, which are opaque to longwave radiation. This process allows your automobile or a greenhouse to heat up.

You have detected longwave radiation if you have felt the heat (longwave) radiation when passing your palm over the burners of your stove before the elements glow red.

CO2 in the atmosphere, according to scientists, behaves similarly to the glass in a greenhouse or your automobile. The atmosphere emits visible (shortwave) radiation absorbed by the ground and causes it to heat up.

Consider a blacktop road or the concrete around a pool that becomes too hot to walk on barefoot in the summer. The Earth emits longwave (thermal) radiation, but it cannot flow back through the atmosphere because it is opaque to longwave radiation.

Is There Any Proof?

What evidence do we have that this is correct? Only physicists who specialize in radiation transmission in the atmosphere completely understand how this mechanism works. So, if someone who isn't an atmospheric physicist asserts that the Earth's greenhouse warming isn't real, they certainly have no idea what they're talking about.

he evidence for us comes from the rise in atmospheric and oceanic temperatures (Figure 1) and the melting of ice in glaciers, Greenland, and Antarctica since the industrial revolution began.

Over 97 percent of climate experts agree that global warming is real and that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are blamed. The few scientists who disagree with the consensus each have their hypotheses about what is happening with the climate, and each sees errors in the logic of the other.

Effects of Climate Change

(Photo : PABLO COZZAGLIO/AFP via Getty Images)

Mountain glacier recession (melting), melting of the Antarctic and Greenland icecaps, and increasing intensity of storms, fires, and floods are signs of global warming.

"It is unequivocal that human impact has warmed the atmosphere, oceans, and land," the new IPCC report from 2021 concludes. There have been widespread and fast changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere."