So, we know that there is a long-term natural warming and cooling cycle based on a set of complicated factors that interact with each other. We also know that there is an 11-year sunspot cycle, but evidence seems to show that it has very little effect on temperature change, global warming, or climate change. This leads us to the another important thing you need to understand when it comes to thinking about climate change:
We know that the long-term warming and cooling cycle, and the short-term sunspot cycle, do not seem to correlate to increases in global average temperatures and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, suggesting that the temperature of the planet, and the level of carbon dioxide is increasing for reasons other than natural cycles.
Let me try to explain this in another way: when we look at natural warming and cooling cycles, the carbon dioxide levels always tend to lag behind the temperature. In other words, when increases in temperature take place, it leads to increases in carbon dioxide levels; when decreases in temperature take place, it leads to decreases in carbon dioxide levels. The idea is that temperature change takes place first, and changes in carbon dioxide levels follow, as a secondary reaction to the change in temperature.
But right now, the sequence of events is different – it has flip-flopped. In this present warming trend that we are in right now, carbon dioxide levels are actually leading the warming trend rather than lagging behind the warming trend, thus suggesting that the present warming trend isn’t part of the natural cycle, but is happening for other reasons.
What is happening is that there is an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it is causing what meteorologists, and other related scientists, like to refer to as a greenhouse effect. It’s helping to keep more of the sun’s heat and energy on our planet, and in our atmosphere, and this is leading to increases in global temperatures, and what we like to call climate change.
On top of that, when we look at the history of warming and cooling cycles over the course of the last one hundred thousand years or so, as have been recorded by scientists using different techniques that are available to them, we should still be in a cooling cycle, and that cycle should be continuing for thousands more years into the future yet to come. But we aren’t. Instead, we are in a warming trend, meaning we have deviated from the natural warming and cooling cycles.
This is where we ask an important question: Where is all of this carbon dioxide, leading to more greenhouse effect, and global warming, coming from?
There seems to be only one possible explanation for all of this carbon dioxide. We humans are putting it there. It’s not coming from volcanic activity, or some other natural phenomenon – we are the only explanation for where this greenhouse gas is coming from. We humans, and human civilization in general, is the only other factor in this equation that can account for the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Because of this, many scientists have concluded that man-made climate change is indeed a fact – of course, I talk more about what this actually means in another article later in this article series. Although there seems to be this consensus among scientists, we don’t really don’t know how much of the Earth’s present warming trend is in fact based on us – half of it, or three-fourths of it, or even more – and how much of it is based on other factors, such as the amount of ice and snow covering the planet, the amount of the planet’s surface which is covered with oceans and seas, which can change based on sea levels, and most importantly the amount of vegetation and forest covering the planet, which can absorb heat and carbon dioxide. Like I said in the previous article in this series, all of these factors interact with each other in very complicated ways, although the evidence does seem to suggest that it is more likely to be us, and less likely to be anything else, including some kind of natural cycle.
This last thing – amount of vegetation and forest covering the planet – is also something that is very heavily dependent on humans, as we have a tendency, in our human civilizations, to cut down forests to make way for more agricultural lands, something we’ve done since ancient Sumer, like I talked about in another article. In another article in this series, I talk about how we can use increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere to allow us to compensate for reduced vegetation and forest cover, thus using it to our advantage, but you’re just going to have to stay tuned, and keep reading the articles in this series to find out what I mean.
