Climate Change, why is it so hard to understand? If you’re not a scientist, it is hard to see and hard to understand. If you’re a scientist, it’s hard to understand why it is hard to understand. However, this inability to explain life-threatening and avoidable phenomena is the scientists’ fault.
Now I have been discussing this issue for a long time. Being a trained engineer and with a BS in Physics, I recently came to understand why it is so hard to understand and see the reality.
The fault lies in the graphs. The graph most often shown is the one which tracks temperatures from the 1800s.
This plot is confusing and doesn’t give context. It shows that temperature is going up, it shows that carbon dioxide is going up but from this plot, it is not obvious that it is man-made unless you are sure of it. If you’re not, the correlation is not causation and you can simply say: why is this not nature?
This is why when I speak with people, I tell them that what’s happening now, is on a different timescale. Global temperatures changed by 2 degrees over the course of MILLIONS of years. If they did change drastically and quickly, it was due to supervolcanoes or meteorites. We do not have meteorites, there are no super volcanoes and the temperatures changed by almost 2 degrees, not over millions of years, but less than 200, and most of it over the past 50 years! So this is why it CANNOT be a natural change. This is why it is absolutely and without a doubt man-made.
This is how scientists need to speak. All their fancy figures and degrees are worthless if they can’t explain the essence of the argument in simple to understand terms. You need to show how over the past 2000 years, the temperatures were stable and nothing except human activity has created a large increase.
Scientists are used to convincing other scientists who have context and education to understand them. Most people don’t have this, this is why they are not scientists. This is why when it comes to most people, scientists don’t have a data problem, they have a context and explanation problem. If they don’t figure it out, we are all dead. Because humanity does not just rest on the scientists’ ability to understand nature, but also to communicate it.
not-rushin 