Global Warming

Are We To Blame For The Heat?

People talk about global warming, but what does it actually mean? As defined by the dictionary, global warming is “an increase in the earth’s average atmospheric temperature that causes corresponding changes in climate and that may result from the greenhouse effect.” Most people know that global warming is happening. People can feel the temperature rising. Many scientists have researched global warming and they have concluded that global warming is human induced. Some people, however, decided to believe that the human induced climate change is not real. Naomi Oreskes decided to answer some questions on whether climate change is due to humans in her article “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?”

Oreskes’s purpose for writing this text is to bring awareness to scientific consensus which is the scientific evidence that supports human induced climate change. She is trying to persuade people to acknowledge that climate change is human-induced. Oreskes does this by providing evidence that scientific consensus is real, identifying the contrarians, and by counter arguing the counter argument. In this essay I will be identifying Oreskes’s project and argument.

Oreskes’s thesis is that scientific consensus on human-induced climate change is not wrong. She uses the ice core samples, tree rings, global temps, and the IPCC to prove her point.

Oreskes uses climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as key supporters of human induced climate change. She states that scientists must provide enough evidence through research to validate their thinking about climate change. The IPCC is an organization that “compiles and assesses existing knowledge on politically charged issues.” (para9) The IPCC agrees that scientific consensus is actually happening by stating that “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas...