Rising Global Temperatures

The articles about the IPCC report discusses the consequences of increased global temperatures at 1.5 degrees C and 2.0 degrees C. These issues were recently reported to be much more dire than initially reported back in 2015 according to a by Bill Hare as reported by The New York Times. The articles talk about how carbon capture and carbon dioxide removal technologies are still both untested on large scales as well as too expensive for commercial use. I believe that further research should be funded into these technologies so that we might be able to prevent irreversible damages, although the articles express that on the political side of things, this might not be possible. Effective socio-technological fixes could in theory be employed before temperature increase reaches 2.0 degrees C, possibly even 1.5 degrees C, however, it is extremely likely that they won’t be. If we wanted to be able to roll out potential fixes and improvements to our society to reverse these effects, we would have to make huge societal changes. People who are not on board with enacting policies that would help deal with global warming would have to change their entire opinions about something that they fundamentally oppose, which isn’t an easy task to do.

Climate science deniers often say that climate science is still in its infancy, however, in Michael Reidy’s article about John Tyndall, we know that these statements aren’t true. Reidy mentions that in Tyndall’s paper to the Royal Society of London he talks about the repercussions of changes to the make up of the atmosphere (Reidy, 13). Tyndall’s paper was published in 1861, which when looking at how fast technology and research has advanced, is a very long time ago, therefore discrediting climate science deniers claim that climate science is too young to have relevancy.