For those who think that climate change doesn’t exist or is some sort of natural process that recycles from century to century, you may not this summary. Man is dumping CO2 into the air and it is accumulating at a rate never known to scientists test covering tens of thousand of years. I you live in Florida you will face the consequences much sooner than you think, indeed you are already feeling the results of climate change.
“The amount of carbon dioxide humans are putting into the atmosphere is smaller but it’s not balanced, and so it builds up over time and it causes a sizable net gain,” Ruddiman explained.
“It may be 10 billion tons a year but much of it builds up year after year after year,” he said, and persists in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a chemical blanket.
Scientists who have used a variety of techniques to track earth’s changing climate over hundreds of thousands of years have found data that show carbon dioxide levels during that period never grew faster than 30 parts per million per 1,000 years. Yet the level has risen by that amount in just the last 17 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international organization widely regarded by the scientific community as a leading authority on the topic.
The result is the warmer temperatures and melting icecaps widely documented around the globe.
via Politifact slams climate science denier John Loughlin « Climate Progress.
Coral Gables Watch 