New Ideas

Weather you believe in it or not most people seem to think that climate change is a new idea. The problem is it is not a new idea. It was in 1896 a Swedish scientist (Svante Arrhenius) published a new idea. As humanity burned fossil fuels such as coal, which added carbon dioxide gas to the Earth's atmosphere, we would raise the planet's average temperature. This "greenhouse effect" was only one of many speculations about climate change. Scientists found technical reasons to argue that our emissions could not change the climate. Indeed most thought it was obvious that puny humanity could never affect the vast climate cycles, which were governed by a benign "balance of nature." In any case major change seemed impossible except over tens of thousands of years.

The way that the scientific community works, someone comes up with a theory, gathers evidence and then publishes a study says that his/her new theory could explain some part of the world. Then most other scientists rubbish the theory and try and disprove it. To disprove it they need to either gather data that says the original result was out for some reason or they have to point out a flaw in the methods. Once this happens either the original theory is revised or if completely off is thrown out. The important point here is that you must have evidence to back up your statements/theorems. As a theory is revised and more data gathered it becomes more robust with less shortcomings.

This is exactly what has happened to the theory of human induced climate change. For over 70 years after the theory was proposed various people worked on it. In the beginning there was allot of skepticism and allot of argument, most scientists thought the idea was rubbish. However as others gathered data, often to disprove his theory, the idea gained merit. The mounting evidence reached a critical mass in about 1980 and the was serious amounts of work started to happen in the climate change arena.  In 1985 a joint UNEP/WMO/ICSU Conference on the "Assessment of the Role of Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases in Climate Variations and Associated Impacts" assessed the role of carbon dioxide and aerosols in the atmosphere, and concluded that greenhouse gases "are expected" to cause significant warming in the next century and that some warming is inevitable. The worries first caught wide public attention in the summer of 1988, the hottest on record till then (Most since then have been hotter) when James E. Hansen made one of the first testimonies in front of the US Congress that human-caused warming had already measurably affected global climate. Both the UNEP and WMO had followed up on the 1985 Conference with additional meetings. In 1988 the WMO established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with the support of the UNEP. The IPCC continues its work through the present day, and has issued a series of Assessment Reports and supplemental reports that describe the state of scientific understanding at the time each report is prepared. The earliest report was issued in 1990.

Scientists from many and various fields have studied climate change and in the last 10 year there has not a single published peer reviewed paper that has any evidence that climate change is not happening. Even scientists who are deniers, once given the data and told to analyse it, tend to give in to the weight of evidence. The rest of this paragraph is from this piece in the New York Times. "Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth. His climate-skeptic credentials are pretty strong: he has denounced both Al Gore and Tom Friedman as “exaggerators,” and he has participated in a number of attacks on climate research, including the witch hunt over innocuous e-mails from British climate researchers. Not surprisingly, then, climate deniers had high hopes that his new project would support their case. Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by other groups.”"

People try to say that there is no consensus amongst scientists however this is not true. There is some argument about minor details of the climate models such as the degree to which aerosols will help mitigate the affects of climate change. There is no argument as to weather climate change is happening or who caused it! to drive home the point is a well written concise statement by the National Research Council. "Although the scientific process is always open to new ideas and results, the fundamental causes and consequences of climate change have been established by many years of scientific research, are supported by many different lines of evidence, and have stood firm in the face of careful examination, repeated testing, and the rigorous evaluation of alternative theories and explanation."

We is Australia have people that provide expert advice as well. The Australian Climate Change Commission was set up by the federal government to synthesize the latest science and provide the best advice that scientist have to offer with regards to climate change. Here is a link to the Key messages from the Australian Climate Commission.  Climate change is real and we are at a critical juncture and we need to make moves to reduce our Carbon Dioxide output. The Climate is not a belief system it doesn't care weather we believe it is behaving differently. The climate is not a democratic system you cannot vote for it to stay the same. What affects it is physical factors and the major one at the moment is the amount of CO₂ we pump out into the Atmosphere. If Australia and the rest of the world want to avoid the worst effects of climate change then we need to curb our CO₂ output.