Climate change is real. Despite widespread confusion across the US population, 99% of scientists now agree that human-caused climate change is a reality. Scientifically speaking, there is just no doubt.
This week, I read a fascinating article in The Guardian, and it made a big impact on me. It showed a version of the graph below, which is a fairly standard picture of the temperatures observed between 1884-2015 and the projected future temperatures under different emissions scenarios.
February 2017 was the second warmest in history—as warm as the average March in our region. Grass greened up, it felt like spring, and many plants started to break dormancy. Everything was great until things went back into the deep freeze from March 20-22, when many locations in Maryland had night temperatures between 23-28 degrees for 1-3 nights.
How do we figure out how the world works? We have an idea, we test it and we find that the results either support our idea or they don’t. If we do multiple tests and don’t see the results that our idea predicts, we either reject the idea as false, or we modify it and retest. If we persist and refuse to accept any idea that we or others have shown is false, we close in on an explanation that is likely to be correct.
The Climate Corner 