Don’t look up.
“For decades now, scientists have been warning us that extreme weather events will be exacerbated by this blanket of carbon pollution we’ve been wrapping around our planet,” said Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.
I don’t know how I feel about framing carbon dioxide emissions as “pollution.” All this carbon has been in the atmosphere before, it’s just been trapped in the ground for hundreds of millions of years. There’s got to be a way to talk about that so low information people get it. They definitely don’t see carbon dioxide as pollution, since it’s intangible and a healthy portion of our atmosphere
I mean sulfur is also a natural part of our atmosphere that geologic activity has been spewing out into the air for as long as earth has had air, but I’m still going to call it pollution if you’re power plant pumps a vast quantity of it into the atmosphere and now it’s raining acid on me.
We have more than doubled the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, with half of that doubling having been done in the last thirty years alone. The very oceans are acidifying to the point large swaths of marine life are being wiped out, and thousands to hundreds of thousands of people are being killled by the effects of global warming each and every year. It’s pollution, it’s just the pollution is on such a vastly larger and more dangerous scale than any acid rain or smog people are used to thinking about.