Persuasive Essay About Climate Change

Climate change has been a very hot topic over the past two decades, with many people denying its existence or cause by humans. Climate change took off as a concept in the 1970s, when protection of the environment was at one of its strongest points. It began as being known as global warming, but has become better known as climate change because these climate changes were not only warming the planet, but causing destructive weather around the globe. This has become a global issue and is highly debated by politicians, but many now take it as a hoax or a miscalculation of the climate data. Although a large part of our population continues to deny it, human caused climate change is a real problem in our word today and needs to be solved or mitigated

Using the data from several sources such as ice cores, pollen, and alkenone from 73 locations worldwide, a team of researchers from Oregon State University and Harvard University have graphed the global temperatures for the previous 11,300 years. This data has revealed a graph that resembles a hockey stick, in which the graph remains steady until it shoots up with no sign of coming back down. The “stick” of the hockey stick begins with the lower temperatures at the beginning of the Holocene, slowly rises then falls again over the 11,000-year period without differing more than half of a degree Celsius (Marcott, 2013). This data shows that human activity is greatly linked with climate change. Before the industrial revolution, all changes in climate were very gradual and stayed within half a degree of the average temperature. Directly after the industrial revolution however, the global temperatures spiked and grew over 1 degree Celsius in under 200 years. This sudden change in temperature only caused by a large catastrophic event or human interference. In this case, we are burning fossil fuels, which in turn warms our

This claim is most commonly stated by policy-makers and the media, generally in the United States. This argument is used against those attempting to adopt strong restrictions on fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions. This large disagreement in the scientific community is simply not the case. All major scientific bodies of the United Nations along with the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association of the Advancement of Science, agreed that climate change is caused by human activity. There is a possibility that these scientific bodies are simply biased and have ignored the claims made by peer reviewed papers arguing against the existence of climate change. In reference to this possibility, Oreskes wrote, “That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change” (Oreskes, 2004). 75% of the papers either explicitly supported human involvement in climate change, evaluated the impacts of climate change, or were suggesting mitigations to climate change. The other quarter of the papers were relating to methods and paleoclimate, thus had no position on current climate change. Out of all 928 papers, not one took a