Climate Denial Ain't Just a Climate River in Climate Egypt

No, that's an ice cube.  It's different.

Climate change deniers up and down the Northeast Corridor are snickering in their little snow boots. Over the past week in the Delaware Valley, every resident was treated to 50,000 cubic feet of snow per acre. That's enough snow to build a 50,000 cubic foot snowcube!

We've also gotten twice as much snow at this point in the year as the average. The word "snowpacolypse" is now the most common search phrase, overtaking "is facebook shutting down?" But before we throw a Phew, That Was Close! It Looked For a Minute As Though Man May Be Irreversibly Altering the Climate, But Thankfully, No, It Was Merely Some Zany Scientists That Love a Good Hoax party, let's actually remind ourselves of what's going on up there.

Not to scale.  Which is the problem.

Starting here on the surface of the earth and rising 15 kilometers is the troposphere. The next 35 kilometers comprises the stratosphere. Another 40 kilometers, that's the mesosphere. Above that, for 250 more kilometers, is the thermosphere. Those four layers make up the Earth's atmosphere, the space beyond which we typically refer to as, well, space.

To understand how the cumulative volume of what we call "atmosphere" relates to the size of the planet itself, picture an image of Earth as photographed from space. Now draw a circle just outside Earth's perimeter, only one percent of the radius of the planet. That's how relatively thin all the gases are that control life on Earth.

Due to limitations in dry-erase marker technology, this diagram is not to scale.  The atmosphere is actually five times thinner than as shown above.  It should be noted that while the inner circle was an outlining of a compact disc, the outer circle was drawn by hand, and I should be applauded for it.

For more mental imagery, envision a basketball as Earth. How big would the atmosphere be around old Spalding? A mere one-tenth of an inch thickness all the way around. That's not much, and that's my point.

Our atmosphere is a highly-delicate environment. It's evolving on its own just like any grouping of organisms that lay within its realm. But even in the midst of its natural evolution, we - you, me and all of humanity - are precipitating far greater rates of change than the 'background noise' of gradual progressions of millions of years.

The deniers, still in their snow-boots (and in the house, no less), then ask: Who says?

Ice cores: nature's most perfect murder weapon.

Ugh. Fine. The answer lies in the decades of empirical data, studying the proportions of gases in the atmosphere and how it changes over time. It's in the findings within ice cores that reveal temperature changes over hundreds of thousands of years. It's in the geological examination of ancient rock, revealing what organisms lived when, what the climate was like, and indications as to disruptions (extinctions, natural disasters, etc.).

Does any one individual want to pore over all this data? Frick no. But once you do, you'll likely come to the same conclusion that 97% of accredited scientists have come to: something drastic happened right around the mid-1700s. When we consult our history books, we see that the Industrial Revolution coincides fittingly with that timeframe. Could it be that the exponential rise in carbon dioxide spewed into the air from factories and vehicles and overall mechanization not only direct correlates - that much is fact - but directly caused the severe uptick in the very same gases as currently represented in today's measurable atmosphere? Those that honor logic would unequivocally say yes.

This looks complicated, and its implications may attack my personal wealth, therefore it must be a fiction someone created to gain power over me.  Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a hole in the ground that's missing my head.

Climate science is a hell of a venture.  It has required the aggregate work of generations of interested parties.  It's all documented, transparently viewable to the general public.  Is it difficult to understand?  Sure it is.  But so is chemotherapy.  So is molecular physics.  And yet we don't impugn these as falsehoods.  We only challenge the nearly-settled science because of the massive and yes, inconvenient, ramifications.  It really is going to suck to put up with rising sea levels, intensified natural phenomena, and the loss of biodiversity.  But anticipated suckiness does not a hoax make.

I believe that was Descartes.