Climate Science

     The science behind climate change cannot only involve one scientific field of study. It requires the gathering and pooling of data from a multitude of studies from a large number of scientists located throughout the world. More recently, the reality of human caused global warming has pushed the scientific community to step back from their specific fields of research and look at the big picture of what their findings mean to better understand Earth's global processes. Such pooling of data has lead to the formation of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which covers "the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation" (UNFCCC, web). Whether or not one believes the UNFCCC holds true promise for stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, it's hard to deny that such gathering of scientific research is, for lack of another word, exciting.
      To see such worldwide cooperation among the scientific community gives hope to those that cannot find it among the world's leading policy makers. With so much of the scientific community agreeing on what is causing such a dramatic change in global temperature, us, what is now needed is leadership. Leadership in the form of grassroot movements that will catch fire to the extent that the global leaders who failed us in Copenhagen will not be able to shrug off the inevitable. In order for us to work toward a resilient future, we must start making the hard decisions about how we are going to deal with global warming now.