By Nathaniel Weinzapfel

Introduction:

*This story originally aired on Earth Day, April 22nd.

First held in 1970 and recently reaching its 50th year anniversary, Earth Day is an annual holiday held to demonstrate support for environmental protection and celebrate life on our planet, with over a billion people participating in related events worldwide. In celebration of Earth Day today, WFHB presents a mock climate change debate with Professor Ben Kravitz, a climate scientist and assistant professor at Indiana University. The Professor and I went back and forth with myself portraying a climate denier asking him questions or making statements that are skeptical of climate change. The Professor, with his prior experience with climate change skeptics, was able to explain why common climate myths are incorrect. Ideally, you listeners out there can understand his arguments and hopefully be able to debate your relatives more effectively at the next family gathering! Now without further ado, here is the Q&A.

Q&A Section:

I'm going to ask the professor questions that a climate change denier would say or comments, they would say, so that we can see how a climate scientist would respond so that you listeners at home can be able to tell your relative why they're wrong. So….

I'll do my best.

For this first one it is. So it was such a cold winter, there was a big snowstorm at the beginning of February, surely global warming can't be happening if it is still so cold.

Well, winter is always going to be cold. We're not talking about winter, suddenly becoming summer. And also, one of the most important words in the phrase global warming is global. A snowstorm in one place doesn't necessarily mean anything. What we're looking at is large scale changes over a long time period, which is what's happening under global warming, and how those changes might affect individual locations.

And so when it comes to global climate, some people say the climate is always changing. The Earth goes through a series of warming and cooling periods. There was a cooling period during the medieval times. Would it be possible that right now we're just going through a warming period?

So it's absolutely right that the Earth's climate has always changed, and we've gone through warming and cooling periods. And in fact, the periods that we've gone through in the past, the warming periods, some of them have been a lot warmer than what we're experiencing now. So that's not the issue. Usually those warming periods take 10s of 1000s or hundreds of 1000s of years or some major event like a huge volcanic eruption or a meteor hitting the Earth, we're not seeing any of that. What we're seeing is very rapid changes in a very short period of time. And also, we have a mechanism for it like we understand the physics of what happens if you put large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We've known about that since the mid 1800s. This is 19th century science. Right now, that's what we're seeing, we're seeing the effects that we might expect from doing those sorts of things. So I mean, science doesn't prove anything, it is always possible that this could be due to natural causes, and not due to humans. But I'd say the chance of that is very, very small. And there is no evidence supporting it, that we've been able to discover.

Professor Ben Kravitz.

And even if global warming were occurring, wouldn't warming be better? There would be less cold waves, more areas of the world, such as the north would be more habitable, there'd be better growing seasons, stuff like that?

Well, I think you'd have to ask the people who live in the north if they think it would be better, because better has a different meaning for everybody. So it is true that areas in the north would get warmer, but areas everywhere would get warmer,