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In his climate change denial letter in last week’s edition, Aaron Reesman said “Anyone who has studied the geologic history of Wisconsin would tell you that if it wasn’t for climate change, we would be sitting on the bottom of an ancient inland sea.” Well I’m geologist so I guess that means me. And like the rest of his letter Mr. Reesman has misinterpreted the facts, leading to erroneous conclusions.
Yes Wisconsin was once under a warm shallow sea, but what altered that was hundreds of millions of years of plate tectonics, which lifted Wisconsin up and moved it north, thereby slowly changing the climate, not the other way around. This is the problem I have observed repeatedly with the anti-science folks. They cobble together and misinterpret a series of facts in a vain attempt to stick their finger in the dike holding back reality.
Briefly, here a few simple facts. Carbon dioxide measurably absorbs more heat from our sun than our natural mix of atmospheric gases, fact. Since the industrial revolution we humans have measurably increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere 30% by extracting over 400 billion of tons of fossil fuels from our ground and putting them into our air, fact. You cannot change the composition of a dynamic system, as we have, without changing the properties of that system and how it behaves, fact. Just because it’s been cold recently in North America, does not mean that's true for the rest of our planet or that the laws of physics have been suspended. Our climate is changing fast, we are responsible for that and we are beginning to pay the price, which for some of us will be very high indeed depending on where we live.
Furthermore, Mr. Reeseman is simply wrong about increasing global temperatures.
From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: The year 2013 tied with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880. The annually-averaged temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average and marks the 37th consecutive year (since 1976) that the annual temperature was above the long-term average. Currently, the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above average. To date, including 2013, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record have occured during the 21st century. Only one year during the 20th century—1998—was warmer than 2013. The global annual temperature has increased at an average rate of 0.06°C (0.11°F) per decade since 1880 and at an average rate of 0.16°C (0.28°F) per decade since 1970.
As someone who has formally studied geological history and paleo-climates, I too was once a climate change skeptic. But that is no longer possible with an honest examination of the mountains of evidence from the scientific community supporting the fact that we are changing our climate, and much faster than it has ever changed before on its own. Individual action is a good thing, but we cannot solve this problem individually, only collectively. We’re all in this together, even the deniers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re up to that challenge collectively as a species.