If someone were to ask you to explain climate change and why you believe it exists, how long do you think it would take?
Really, climate change isn’t all that complicated, and you don’t even need any charts. The only thing you need to know is the role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide being the most abundant. In its natural state, the earth does a good job of self-regulating carbon dioxide between flora and fauna, ourselves included. Plants absorb carbon dioxide, turning it into food for animals, which emit carbon dioxide. For the most part, this carbon cycle is self-regulating and more or less carbon neutral.
To some degree, climate change is normal, with long-term carbon-positive and carbon-negative cycles being reflected in climate variations over centuries. On the other hand, what happens when something throws off this balance, such as man has done over the last couple hundred years? Not only are we cutting down trees and replacing grasslands at an alarming rate, we’re also burning fossil fuels like there’s no tomorrow. Put another way, we’re “burning the candle at both ends,” so to speak, destroying natural carbon-sequestering features and, at the same time, releasing long-buried carbon deposits. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide haven’t even been close to today’s levels in over 320,000 years!
