These graphs from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show the global temperature averages compared to the 1961-1990 average.
I went to the Gilcrease Museum several months ago on one of their free museum days and found myself completely captivated—as so many do—by Thomas Moran’s “Shoshone Falls on the Snake River.”
To say the painting is huge is an understatement. The oil on canvas is 6 feet by 11 feet, with the custom ornate frame adding about a foot.
It grabbed and held my attention for a good 20 to 30 minutes. You have to stand back about five feet or more from the painting to see and appreciate the grand scale. But to really understand it, you have to get close. Obviously not too close (the museum security folks don’t like that), but where you can see the brush strokes and colors that make up the full picture.
That’s the same relationship between our climate and our weather. Our weather is the brush stroke that makes up the bigger, grander picture of our climate. To fully understand and comprehend the climate, one must see the totality of events and look beyond a speck in time and space to see the grand scale.
Unlike Moran’s painting, our climate is changing. Brush strokes now are broader and more dramatic. That makes our painting different than what it was.
Like Althea, I am not a scientist or a meteorologist. But my experience working with them, like her, has educated and informed my thoughts on the matter to bring me to the conclusion that the Earth is warming and climate is changing, through both natural and anthropogenic means.
Tulsa has experienced the warmest January to June period in recorded history. Monumental droughts gripped the state during last summer’s again brutal heat wave. Nationwide, what you see is
more of the same. A lot of use of the term "warm."
While it may be easy to point to those and a slew of other events as evidence of climate change, like I said earlier, it’s not the full picture.
Heidi Cullen is the chief climatologist for Climate Central, an independent, nonprofit research organization that focuses on climate science and collaborates with various national news organizations. She put it to me this way
during an interview I had with her last year:
"It's trying to help people understand that climate is like this big orchestra where you have all these different instruments playing. It's this complex orchestra, within the background now, we can measure and we can see that there is this steady drumbeat of warming - a trend as opposed to a cycle - imprinted on the background of this chaotic orchestra. What scientists are trying to untangle is how does our fingerprint on that complex system, how does it push it in any direction."
The
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that through broad global observations from several sources, “warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”
This page from
NASA provides a wealth of data, is written in layman’s terms and provides information on what remains uncertain.
Global temperature has increased by an average of 1.5 degrees since 1880, according to NASA and NOAA. Arctic sea ice decreases at an average of 12 percent every decade, according to NASA’s observation.
This is happening. It has been and is being measured and observed. It’s a change in our climate.
Whether or not you believe that climate change is real and whether or not you believe humans may play some role, I think there are points on which we can all agree: Rhetoric has become so loud that sitting down and calmly examining evidence is nearly impossible (like it is with nearly every controversial subject). I think we can also agree that taking materials that were once in the Earth, burning them and sending those byproducts into the air is not good.
I know that this is a minority opinion in Oklahoma, but all I ask is that people stop for a moment, learn and think critically. Whatever conclusion you reach will be yours. And be civil about sharing that opinion. Maybe I should have posted that point before the vitriol Althea experienced. Yikes, guys.
Whatever you see when you observe “Shoshone Falls on the Snake River” may not be exactly what I see or interpret. But we should be able to civilly discuss and explain what we see.
--Jerry Wofford
Here is Althea's post from yesterday, which explains why she does not believe climate change is real, at least not yet.
