“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Albert Einstein
As I’m writing this post, we are having our second ice storm of the week…in North Carolina.
If you’re back hurts right now from all the shoveling you have have been doing, or you’re wearing out your ice scraper, you may be wondering – come on…is the climate actually warming? Is it real?
First, a distinction between weather and climate. Weather refers to short-term conditions. Climate has to do with longer-term averages. Or as NOAA puts it, “climate is what you expect, weather is what you get”.
There are a lot of data points out there about the climate, but I want to start with just one – the Earth’s temperature. The average surface temperature has dramatically increased. Until the early 20th century we were actually in a cooling period, but that trend reversed sharply, and now we are on a rapid upswing.
This 30 second video from NASA really tells the story:
Here’s another visual showing changes over time:
The last seven years were the hottest ever recorded. And ocean temperatures are rising even faster.
Why is the temperature rising and what does it mean? Those are topics for another time. Until then, if you want to take a deeper dive into the science and data behind climate change, I recommend this primer by Kerry Emanuel, Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.
But for now, yes, it’s real.