The science-deniers are routinely commenting about climate change with observations about temperature. And too often it sinks the overall discussion into nothing more than a comparison of temperature over particular eras.
The deniers really don’t want the debate to slip beyond this level – into the impacts of climate change and even more importantly, the deeper overall impacts of human activity.
While the specific temperature trends are certainly an important factor, too much is made in the media and within debates about temperature ONLY.
The keys are actually the impacts of the temperatures and the pollution/emissions being poured into our air, water and land.
The oceans are being impacted to an extreme level by human activity – trash, overfishing, pollution and more.
While the US is doing better in some respects with air pollution, some regions of the globe are still horrible – as in China.
The Appalachian Mountains are being destroyed by mining operations – with entire ranges blown up. The material is dumped into mountain streams.
Deforestation is a huge tragedy. Animal species moving into extinction at a rapid pace is a huge tragedy.
It is an indisputable FACT that human activity is impacting the planet. Those wishing to firmly place their head in the sand and ignore the facts will never change the facts.
Denying that something that is undeniably happening isn’t happening isn’t a logical position. It is nothing more than a child putting his fingers into his ears while crying out, “La, la, la, la ….”
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You’re of course right that human damage to the environment goes beyond greenhouse gas emissions, and global warming also leads to more consequences than simply rising temperatures. But even if the only problem were higher temperatures that would be a serious concern on its own, because it would make heat waves more likely, and while they sound benign, they are actually by far the deadliest type of weather event, killing far more people than tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, or periods of subzero temperature.
A number of years ago a physicist named Richard Muller, one of the few scientists questioning global warming, suggested that the anomalous warming observed by climatologists was merely an artifact of factors that threw the measurements off, such as the so-called urban heat-island effect. Together with his daughter Elizabeth (an energy consultant and managing partner of Global Shale, a company involved in hydraulic fracturing of shale to release natural gas) he sought funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and others and assembled a team of scientists who set about assembling their own historical temperature data, one that would correct for the alleged sources of bias in previous analyses. They promised to publish all their data openly and to present the results objectively whatever they proved to be. And to their credit, they did.
Muller and his group assembled a temperature record that essentially matched that of mainstream climate scientists. None of the thing that had concerned them made a significant difference.
Moreover, when they looked into what might explain the anomalous warming, they discovered that “essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.” Muller added that their conclusions were even stronger than those of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Most recently, Muller’s team has computed that 2014 was probably the hottest year on record. Just-released independent analyses by the Japan Meteorological Agency, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA have reached the same conclusion.
World heat records keep getting broken, but the last record cold year was more than a century ago.
For more on this, see my blog post at this link.