BYU Professor Assures Provo Audience That Yes, There Is Global Warming

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On Thursday, the answer from Brigham Young University associate professor Richard Gill was a resounding yes. Speaking to a packed house in the Provo library, Gill was hosted by Utah Valley Sierra Forum. The real question, he said, is what is causing it.

For 70 minutes, Gill presented an in-depth review of what is known about global temperature patterns, what is suspected, and what is forecast. "I don't want to be a missionary; I'm not an evangelist for climate change," Gill said. "What I want to show is where the science is." The science considering climate change must be adversarial, Gill said, and skepticism is the most healthy approach for all involved.

The reality of greenhouse gases is not under debate by any educated person, he said. Greenhouses gases are what make Earth habitable. Today's global average temperature is 59 degrees, but would be zero degrees without greenhouses gases trapping heat in our atmosphere, warming the Earth.

Global warming as a scientific concept was born in the 1890s, "so this is something that has been debated for a long time," Gill said. Another fact that is not under debate is that carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor in the atmosphere have the ability to retain heat. In 1895, scientists predicted that doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would increase global temperature between 3 and 5 percent, but said "there is absolutely no way humanity could burn that much coal and carbon fuel," Gill said. "They said there was no reason for concern." Another fact that is not debated, Gill said, is that the decade from 1998 to 2008 was the warmest decade on record. The complex evidence that climate change is real is measured in deep-ice core samples, bore-hole samples into the Earth's crust, data showing ocean warming, a slight warming in some areas, retreating glaciers, and a change in the distribution of animals locally and globally.

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http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/306295/17/