Global Warming | Climate Change

The truth about global warming and climate change

What is the difference between global warming and climate change?

Published April 2023 | Revised Nov 2023

When Chicxulub, a six-mile-wide asteroid slammed into what is now the Americas, 66 million years ago, it vapourised rocks locally, flattened forests for thousands of kilometres in all directions, blocked out sunlight and set in motion an apocalyptic climate change that led to the extinction of over 70% of earth’s species, including the majestic dinosaurs.

This single impact event triggered tsunamis, earthquakes, landslides, forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and reshaped earth’s climate in a fundamental way. It, of course, warmed the planet extremely at the point of impact and beyond.

To understand global warming and climate change, it is important to understand that the scientifically reconstructed history highlighted above is backed up by data observable today. Scientists don’t always have a consensus, but they have agreed methodologies upon which refutations can be built.

The same cannot be said of our politicians who have found an opportunity to use global warming and climate change as a tool to achieve the careers they would otherwise not have had in leading our societies. Our discourse on climate change and global warming is broken. This article seeks to present a simpler description of what these terms are whilst avoiding the definitions and references that have themselves become casualties of our politics.

What is global warming?

If you put a pot of water on heat and place a thermometer in it, you could record the changes in temperature as the water goes from room temperature at the beginning to boiling at the end. You would have observed and documented the warming of the pot of water by recording the temperature at intervals.

But you could also draw this same conclusion without having to boil the water because it is just what we have come to know about water, heat, pot, thermometer etc. In the same way, scientists can simulate global temperatures into the past or the future on the basis of what they already know about the earth and the things that causes surface temperatures to rise or fall.

So, global warming describes the changes that have been observed in global surface temperatures over the period from the 1800s when records began until now. The data is conclusive and cannot be doubted. There is no point not believing it because it is as true as the data in our pot of water experiment above.

The disputes around global warming are not about whether it is happening or not, it is about what is causing it and what can we do about it if there’s even a point in trying. But as with other discourses that get politicised, politicisation often skews the focus so much that even basic truths are thrown in doubt. Global warming is happening, and there isn’t a single plausible argument against that fact. The why and the what to do about it is what is up for debate.

What is climate change?

Climate change describes the changes observed or projected in global climate. When it starts raining in the middle of an otherwise sunny afternoon, we say the weather has changed. Bright and sunny as forecasted, is now wet and windy.

If Dubai in the Arabian desert starts getting rain on a daily basis, week in week out like the Amazon rainforest does, we say its climate has changed. It Changed from what we knew about what generally happens in deserts into something else that is associated with rainforest, where it generally rains a lot.

We can then speculate on or analyse why that change is happening. We know exactly what causes increased precipitation in the form of rain. We know the same system that creates rain in the warm summer periods, results in snow or hail when it is cold. We even know why the driest place on earth, the Atacama Desert, borders one of the wettest, the Amazon rainforest.

Decades of cutting-edge research, improved observations, calculations and simulations on a global scale means that our understanding of our weather and climate systems have never been this good. We even have tools to investigate the climate patterns on other planets and their moons.

All of this begs the question of why our discourse on global warming and climate change has become so elementary.

Problematic discourse

One central problem with our discourse on global warming and climate change these days is that there are so many conflicting agendas on how to approach these terms. The entire debate has been politicised beyond reason . And the advent of social media entrepreneurship has thrusted global warming onto the list of things social media entrepreneurs can monetise.

The problem with both politicisation and monetisation is that, with almost no barriers to entry, those without the care or at times the ability to square the impact of their positions with their desire to profit are making a complete mockery of what we have achieved though scientific thought, experimentation, and observation.

As those seeking to profit from divisive opinions on climate change and global warming zig us too far in one direction, people on the reasonable side feel a need to zag us sharply in the other direction to regain a sense of balance. The result is a confusing landscape for anyone that simply wants to know what to do. No wonder many have simply given up on even thinking about these issues.

The climate is always changing, the globe has warmed and cooled in cycles over millions of years. Although our records go only as far back as the 1800s, there is useful data on what happened before then. We have some consensus, we have many disagreements, and there are other things that we just don’t know yet.

There is consensus

There is absolutely no doubt that we know what global warming is and how it contributes to climate change. Like the effect of the Chicxulub impact, the impact vaporised rocks and ignited fires locally and triggered globalised climatic changes that lasted longer than the impact itself.

Global warming describes the changing nature of earth's surface temperature and the preponderance of evidence indicates that rises observed since the industrial revolution is man-made and therefore reversible.

Climate change describes the complex changes that various factors such as global warming, sea-level changes, volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics etc can have on local and global climate over time. The massive amount of dust blown into the atmosphere from the Chicxulub impact blocked out the sun and triggered significant changes in the climate.

Our knowledge of weather and climate systems today stands in stark contrast to the level of discourse on these matters. The impact of our distributed weather stations, supercomputer analysis, historical records, and theoretical know-how have been blunted by the divisive nature of the discourse that some of our politicians would rather have us focused on.

It is time we return to the basics.