Global Warming. Part 1

Global warming is real.  It is caused by people and the consequences are likely to be devastating.

This is the first of several posts I will be writing about the basic science of global warming.  I hope to give readers useful tools for debating the deniers.  When your crotchety old uncle starts badmouthing Al Gore, you will be able to respond with scientific fact.  If someone next to you on an airplane sneers that winter storms are the death knell of climate change, you will be able to describe the basic science and some useful history.

The posts will answer three starting point questions.

1. What do we mean by the temperature of the Earth?  
2. What determines that temperature?  
3.  And, finally, why does adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increase the Earth's temperature?  

Answering these questions requires explaining some physics plus a little bit of chemistry.  The science can be presented clearly without using much math.  I've discovered that blogging is a great environment for discussing science.  The give and take will allow me add wonkish detail when requested or to expand explanations to make them more suitable for non-scientists.

This series of posts is motivated by a recent conversation with an environmental activist.  I wanted to know how he stayed optimistic against so much anti-science and anti-environmental propaganda.  How does someone working on a shoestring budget compete sanely with the moneyed forces of darkness?  I just loved his answer. Only history can identify truly significant events, he explained.  We will not know which book or film or speech or song or street protest will be a turning point until after -- sometimes long after -- the event.  Rosa Parks was not the first person to defy segregation laws; but, when she sat down the whole world stood up.  The Vietnam war included many, well-documented brutal events, but Ernest Faas' photo of a street execution of a Vietcong prisoner and Nick Ut's picture of a naked, burned Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack are forever linked to that war.  I doubt if Rachel Carson predicted the impact of "Silent Spring."  Nor did Harriett Beecher Stowe anticipate the response to "Uncle Tom's Cabin."  I could continue with a long list of examples.

So, my environmental activist friend advised me to just write.  Get my message out and encourage everyone else to do the same.  I probably won't find the right words to change history.  Very few people do.  But, nothing is gained by fretting while hoping to hit the longest home run ever.