Greenhouse Gas and Climate Change
Daniel J. Soeder
Abstract
The concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas has reached the highest levels in over 800,000 years. Natural events in the distant geological past, which raised carbon dioxide to levels comparable to those in the atmosphere today resulted in substantial climate change, including the complete loss of the polar ice caps, significant sea level rise, and the extinction of many species. Since the 1980s, a series of distinguished scientists and educators have been raising alarms with the U.S. Congress and the public that the uncontrolled release of fossil fuel combustion products into the atmosphere will have detrimental effects on the climate. Most have been ignored. Nevertheless, primitive computer models from that time showed increasing climate instability, with deeper droughts, more severe storms, killer heat waves, disruption of ocean currents, rising seas, and a greater frequency of environmental disasters; exactly what we are experiencing today. The only thing the models got wrong was the timing. The events that are happening now were not supposed to occur until the latter half of the twenty-first century. Yet, here we are.