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[handwriting]

i found out my girlfriend doesn't believe in global warming today and that she can't defend/explain her perspective. might be a dealbreaker. her dad's a beekeeper, a third of the world's bee population died in the last year and she actually thinks they'll just come back. yikes.

Comments

[just_like_alex]

I feel for you. It's a bit of a dilemma. Trying to change someone's mind about something like that within a relationship seems like pretty dangerous territory, but if she's a reasonable person she might get there anyway?

On the scientific side of things, weather and climate are obviously very complex systems. One of the major developers of chaos theory was a meteorologist. However, solar variation is pretty simple and predictable, and would cause the stratosphere's average temperature to increase along with the troposphere, and it has been decreasing. Furthermore, the average surface temperature of the Earth is currently well below the average temperature for it's existence or even the existence of life (ice caps are a fairly recent development). The point is that it's rising faster than in the last 20,000 years at the very least, starting right around industrialization.

More straightforwardly, when carbon is exposed to oxygen it forms CO2 (a greenhouse gas) and people are digging as much carbon as we can out of its natural sinks much more quickly than it can be replaced, exposing it to oxygen. You would expect this to cause warming and we observe warming. No faith required, just a bit of empiricism.