Why is there disagreement regarding climate change

Nuss:

People are uneducated and people are misinformed. There is a big miscommunication effort being funded by the fossil fuel industry. The fossil fuel industry has been employing the same PR firms and the same legal teams as the tobacco industry was using in the 90’s, so they have been successful in creating this idea that the science is out on it.

If climate change is real, what should we do to combat it?

Wrona:

We have to address it as a global community and the U.S. needs to be doing their part as a world leader and making those changes. I think there is a place for a carbon tax and you hear of it being passed in Canada soon and Australia has passed one although there are references to the fact of “why make a change?” What is the point if our planet is already experiences this much warming, and you know the idea of colonizing other planets, it is totally absurd. We need to be more of a world leader on this front. We have so much ingenuity, we have so much potential and we can do great things.

How is climate change visible where we live?

McKendrick:

That’s tough because we’re talking the difference between weather and climate, and climate change is a slower impact versus weather, which is day to day. You can see it in more extremes. You’ll have longer drier periods versus more extreme wet periods. With climate change it doesn’t necessarily mean warmer it means changes in what we usually see so you’ll have bigger swings one way or the other. Like you’ll have more intense storms then periods of no storms; you’ll have droughts then not droughts so you get more extremes than the normal.

What evidence is there for climate change?

McKendrick:

An international organization takes all of the scientists’ studies and papers on climate and put it together so if someone wants to look at that they can and it would have all of the information they go through every little bit of it. They talk about the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. They’ll talk about trends that go back hundreds of thousands of years in terms of climate and showing the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature.