“This Is Climate Change: A Visual Guide to the Facts” by David Nelles and Christian Serber

I had a really annoying conversation about climate change with my parents over Christmas, where I felt sure my parents were wrong but I didn't have enough information to prove it. My mom magnanimously agreed that the climate is "currently in a warming trend" but she simpered with condescension as she stated humans have no control over the climate. My dad went off on a tangent about dendroclimatology (reading the climate records in tree rings). Sam got so mad that he walked away. I felt helpless.

After stewing about it overnight, first thing next morning I decided it was time for me to arm myself with information. I searched online for books that I hoped would provide unbiased facts, and ended up ordering four. 

This is Climate Change (which, ugh, I can't help singing to the Nightmare Before Christmas theme!!) is the one I chose to read first, since it seemed it would give me a brief but broad overview and promised to be easy to understand--and it delivered. Best of all, it clearly refuted some of the "facts" that my parents had spouted. I hate that my memory is terrible and that the information in this book can't just reside in my head, but I've got the next best thing--the book itself. I'm definitely going to keep it to use as a reference. 

I think this book does a really good job of showing that the rise in greenhouse gases is unquestionably caused by human activity. It starts by explaining that greenhouse gases have always existed, and have always naturally varied, but several different charts make it clear that the sharp increase and current trajectory clearly started with industrialization. Let me stop for a second and mention, via principle of charity: maybe, as well as also believing that the climate is in a warming cycle, my mom also believes its rate of warming is influenced by human activity and she just doesn't believe there's anything we can do about it? (I was too irritated to clarify this during our conversation.) But the book also makes it clear which human activities contribute to this rise, and that a decrease in these activities will result in a decrease of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

My dad claims that attributing global warming to increase in atmospheric CO2 is "old science" and that recently the focus has been on methane. I said (even before reading this book!) I didn't think that was true, and that while methane was also important, it had less of an effect because it didn't hang around as long. My dad countered that methane and CO2 have a similar half-life, which I thought was completely wrong, but I wasn't sure, so I let it drop. Well, guess what? Atmospheric lifetime of CO2 is up to a million years; atmospheric lifetime of methane is 12.4 years. (Disclaimer: I don't actually know if this might have something to do with the amounts of each gas that are present. The concentration of CO2, measured in parts per million or ppm, is much higher than the concentration of methane, which is measured in parts per billion or ppb. Plus it's possible we were talking at cross-purposes and were both right: my "hanging around" time might not mean the same thing as "half-life." My knowledge doesn't run deep enough to answer these questions.)

My mom thinks that the recent rise in CO2 levels is "majorly impacted by the great increase in huge forest fires, and the solution is to plant more trees." The truth is that 85% of global CO2 emissions are from the burning of fossil fuels, 5% is from cement production, and 10% is from land use (slash-and-burn clearance of rain forests, and I would assume we can include forest fires in this category). Majorly impacted? Sure. The majority of impact? No. Plant more trees? Sure. This will solve everything? No. 

The jury is still out on dendroclimatology. My dad says that the visitor's center at Petrified Forest National Park has a chart showing spikes in greenhouse gases in past millennia to levels that are just as high as those we see today. This book does not address dendroclimatology, but it does cover ice core samples, which show this: Over the past 800,000 years, concentrations of CO2 have gone up and down, staying between 160ppm and 310ppm, until human activity became a factor. When this book was written in 2021, CO2 was up to 404ppm. I googled it just now, and the most up-to-date figure is 419.07ppm. Methane concentrations have varied from 330ppb to 750ppb in the past, but were up to 1,843ppb when this book was published, and were 1,902ppb in 2023. Nutshell version: atmospheric CO2 and methane concentrations are at the highest they've ever been, and getting higher. I wonder if the dendroclimatology chart at PFNP does not extend to modern measurements? If the chart is based solely on tree ring data from petrified wood, it would not be surprising if the chart does not include recent data. Anyway, maybe someday I'll be able to see it myself to find out.

My parents didn't say anything about this in our climate discussion, but I've definitely seen this sort of thing posted online: "Melting ice won't raise the sea level. Displacement! I can science!" What these people are missing is knowledge of the difference between sea ice and land ice. It is true that melting sea ice will not cause a rise in sea levels, but melting land ice (specifically the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica) definitely will--and already has. And just because melting sea ice doesn't contribute to rising sea levels doesn't mean it isn't a problem, because it does contribute to a feedback loop that accelerates global warming (see "ice-albedo feedback"). 

So that's all I have to say about that. This is a really helpful book and I highly recommend it. I would be super interested to hear how a climate-change-denier reacts to it, but *only* if they actually read the whole thing and take the time to understand it, and *only* if they're not allowed to arbitrarily decide that the facts that don't fit their worldview must not be true. (This book has tons of sources that can be reached through an online bibliography here.) Here's one more little interesting tidbit which I did not even realize until I reached the end of the book: it was originally written in German by two university students who wanted to "find a book that explained the nuts and bolts of climate change and presented the scientific evidence in a way that was concise and enjoyable to read" but they found that book didn't exist . . . so they wrote it themselves! It was great to have the opportunity to read this book without having to write it first.