by Fraser Los

I can say with the utmost confidence that some in the media sphere are being hoodwinked by a well organized and well funded attempt to deny what amounts to basic science. If you look to the scientists, and their major associations, they ALL recognize the reality of climate change.

The greenhouse effect (and global warming) is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and since the industrial revolution, that CO2 concentration has gone from about 260 parts per million to about 387 ppm today. To put that in perspective, scientists have cited 350 ppm as the safe limit of atmospheric CO2 to avoid major warming and possible runaway greenhouse effect – i.e. the planet Venus. This is scary stuff, I’m not going to lie.

Yes, there is plenty of uncertainty in all this – but that is generally about the results of climate change, not the causes. Yes, it is unclear how it will play out on a planetary scale, mainly because it’s complex and unprecedented. But it is not some well-orchestrated fiction created by international scientists, as many in the blogosphere are suggesting.

It’s important to recognize that no major world science organization denies anthropogenic global warming – they ALL recognize it fully – from world meteorological associations to Scientific American to NASA to the Royal Society.

But don’t take my word for it. If you want to decide for yourself, here are two important links:

This is for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is by definition an organization created to determine if there is scientific consensus (they don’t do primary science – they only assess all the science out there being done independently by scientists).

And this is just a really good synopsis of the science of climate change by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a non-profit put together by many prominent scientists around the world. They offer a good primer on their site, called Global Warming 101, which basically lays all the science behind the issue.

Fraser Los is the editor-in-chief of thegreenpages.ca