We’ve been hearing it for years now. In the street, on TV, among friends or on social networks. We see it everywhere. And we back it up with facts: melting glaciers, record temperatures, rising sea levels, less snow, and so on. But is something that is repeated over and over a reality?
Global warming refers to the increase in global temperatures caused by the mass release of greenhouse gases by humans. This gas traps the sun’s heat and therefore warms temperatures.
In fact, the hottest temperature on Earth has been recorded in recent decades. It happened in July 1913, in Death Valley, California, with a temperature of 56.7°C. According to NASA and many other competent companies, global warming is obvious. According to them, the average global temperature has risen by 0.8°C since the 1880s. But to be sure, we’ve created some graphs with Mathematica that show temperature trends in the cities of New York, Nice, Beijing and Cannes.
As you can see, here we have proof that temperatures have been changing for years. For New York City, the change is not very significant. For Nice, Beijing and Cannes, on the other hand, the change is catastrophic. Those cities have experienced an incredible increase of over 2°C in 40 years.
Now that we know for sure that global warming is real, what exactly are the consequences? As we said, the first consequence is a rise in global temperatures. But this is a snowball effect. Behind this, we have warming oceans, rising sea levels, disappearing glaciers, more and more natural disasters and the destruction of ecosystems.
For those who want to go even further, here’s the NASA website, where you can find all the images before and after global warming and real-time conditions on Earth: https://climate.nasa.gov/.
But if we have all this evidence, why are there still people who don’t believe it?
Since Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, we would tend to think that the typical climate skeptic is a 50-year-old American living on his ranch. But there is no typical profile. In general, a climate skeptic does not deny global warming, but rather denies that human activity is causing all this damage. Even if this has been scientifically proven, some people deny it all the time because they know deep down that their companies or activities are contributing to the climate phenomenon. Or they deny it because they are simply terrified. According to a 2015 Australian study, 15% of Norwegians, 17% of Australians and 12% of Americans deny global warming.
