What’s the real cause of climate change? What the deep data reveals

What’s the real cause of climate change? Is global warming real? Are humans causing climate change? What is climate change? We do a deep dive into the data to find answers. The world today is 0.85 degrees (C) hotter than in 1980, projected to increase 1.5C in 40 years.

A one degree increase means earth retains more energy than all the energy contained in the world’s known oil reserves. This retained energy has to go somewhere. And this is what causes havoc. More water evaporates from the oceans, causing more rainfall, increased energy in hurricanes. Sea levels rise because warmer water expands in volume, and more polar ice melts.

What is climate? The difference between climate vs weather is in the duration of changes. Climate is measured over decades, more than 30 years, weather in days, years.

A higher temperature results in more extreme weather. It imparts more energy to affect more damage.

Almost all energy on earth comes from the sun. The air is drier over land & heats up faster than over sea, because the specific heat capacity of water is higher than that of land, so it remains cooler than land.

As the air from the land goes up to form clouds, colder air from the sea comes to fill the gap. This causes winds. If the sun heats up earth more, it causes a bigger pressure difference between sea and land, causing more severe winds, and more extreme weather.

Global warming accelerates evaporation of oceans, causing more rain, snow hail & droughts. It’s not just about more heat.

Are higher temps be due to a hotter sun? No because its irradiance varies by only about 0.15% over 11 years, not enough to explain the increase in global temps.

Has the earth ever been this hot? Yes, it’s been hotter. 56 million years ago, earth warmed by 5-8C. This was the Paleo-Eocene thermal maximum (or PETM). Much of the land mass went underwater or was uninhabitable by animals.

Scientists believe PETM is the most analogous event to what we are experiencing now. PETM was also initiated by increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but it was from volcanoes.

Why does CO2 cause warming? Greenhouse gases have at least three atoms in their molecules. They are loosely held so can absorb more vibrational energy. They’re efficient absorbers of long wave range light (heat) which bounces up from the earth’s surface. They re-emit this radiation back to Earth, resulting in warming. Non-greenhouse gases don’t absorb heat, allowing it to pass into space.

On average net 0.24 gigatons of carbon was emitted into the atmosphere during a 50,000 year period during PETM. But humans are emitting fifty times more today. The current 1 degree warming occurred in less than 100 years, not 1000s of years as in PETM.

Is human carbon emission a cause of global warming? Study of isotopes of carbon in the atmosphere shows higher C12 to C13 raios. Fossil fuels contain higher C12 so this is evidence.

Volcanic eruptions increase C13, not C12. Volcanoes emit 1% as much CO2 as we do. The sun is not cause because it would heat both the upper AND lower atmosphere. But we see only warming of the lower atmosphere.

When simulations are run using just natural causes of climate change, they predict no change in temperature. When unnatural emissions are added, it matches the data perfectly.

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