Saturday, October 30, 2010

Climate change: How do we know?


That's a great graph, isn't it? It's from NASA's Global Climate Change website. It shows atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, mostly from ice cores, for the past 650,000 years. Of course, we've known about the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide since the mid-1800's.

Will this change any minds? Of course not. Climate change deniers - and I believe that includes every single Republican running for the U.S. Senate - aren't that rational. If they were, they'd accept the scientific consensus, as least provisionally.

Picking anything other than the scientific consensus is just believing what you want to believe. And since Republicans don't want to do anything about it, they choose not to believe the science. It's exactly the same thing as sticking your head in the sand in order to believe that you're in no danger.

There's lots more information available at NASA, including several more graphs. But this one is particularly dramatic, isn't it? Too bad we don't seem to be smart enough to pay attention.

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