A First Step to Getting Others to Accept Human Impacts on Climate

While not directly Peak Oil related, a question that has pondered me for about 18 years is how to get others to accept the possibility that we, as humans, are impacting climate, possibly causing a global warming of considerable proportion.

This question came up in my mind yet again this past week. I've been co-teaching a course this semester at our seminary, titled Ethics, Environment, and Development. As part of the course, we have the students watch the Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," and then have a discussion about it. Like other discussions I've had with students on global warming, few seem to be willing to accept the possibility that human activity is having an impact. And even fewer are willing to accept changes that might be needed except for the same tired litany of using CFL bulbs, turning off lights, and driving a hybrid, and realizing those changes alone aren't enough. I saw the same response back in the early 1990s when I used to show a different movie, James Burk's "After the Warming." That movie was even more powerful, I thought, than Gore's movie in that it attempts to portray what the future might look like in a significantly warmer world. My students were speechless.

I guess I don't blame them for being afraid. But it sure helps if one can accept that we are having an impact on the climate and change is necessary. One of Al Gore's criticisms in his movie is the number of skeptics that keeping trying to fight against the idea of human impacts on climate.

In response to those who are skeptical, after some pondering during a very slow and long walk after class on Thursday, I think I've come up with a fairly simple explanation. An explanation I hope will be easy enough for someone to accept. Let me try it on for size:

Any time humans burn either oil, coal, or natural gas, we are releasing into the atmosphere carbon dioxide (CO2, a gas known to have "greenhouse" effects) that hasn't been there for a very, very long time (at least not for millions of years, or at least hundreds of thousands of years, since the carbon was first locked up by plants before being buried and eventually become gas, coal, and oil). This "ancient sunlight," now released again, means more CO2 in the atmosphere than before humans started burning oil, coal, and gas. We've been burning this ancient sunlight in ever increasing quantities for over 100 years now. And since we haven't been increasing the amount of plants in the world (in fact, the quantity and density of plants has been decreasing), which conceivably could remove that released CO2 again, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere must be increasing. So unless you feel that CO2 has no function in a retention of the sun's energy and temperature in the atmosphere, then we as humans must be having some impact.

It's as simple as that.

Notice I'm not saying anything yet about the amount of impact (other than suggest it is likely increasing), or that all measured climate warming is due to humans. For the moment I'd be happy if people just accept the fact that we are having an impact. Better yet, I'd be happy if they understand that the burning of oil, coal, and gas is the form or source of an impact, and therefore the reduction of the same burning is needed to remove that impact.

Let me start there and let this idea sit for a time.

From a currently sunny Dubuque,
Kevin Anderson