UNL report: Climate change debate is settled

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September 29, 2014 By admin Filed Under: Crops, Dairy, News

The question of whether we’re moving into a long period of extreme climate change—made worse by “human activities”—or simply going through a natural weather cycle, has generated considerable debate in recent years.

But according to a new report on climate change from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), the debate is over, as far as climate scientists are concerned anyway. One of the report’s lead authors, UNL climate scientist Don Wilhite, says there is no doubt that human activities are the primary factor in climate change.

“The reality is the science is sound,” Wilhite says. “It’s the human dimension of this in terms of particularly greenhouse gases, but also things like changes in land use and how that affects the climate by different reflectivity of the ground and so forth.

“But the big cause is the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions, in increasing concentrations.”

Another one of the report’s authors, UNL professor of climate modeling Bob Oglesby, offers this perspective.

“Humans don’t cause climate change. I say that in the context (that) climate always changes anyway. It’s always changed in the past, it’s going to change in the future due to natural causes,” Oglesby says. “That said, human activities are strongly affecting the way climate is changing at this time. Furthermore, we’re making the climate change much more rapidly than it typically does due to natural processes.”

Wilhite says it’s time to stop denying and start addressing the problem.

“People need to become better educated about this issue and stop sort of denying it exists and start learning about these changes,” he says, “and then what not only they should do individually, but what we need to do as a country and as a state and what we should expect out of our elected officials. Because a lot of our elected officials are essentially denying that this even occurs.”

AUDIO: Don Wilhite (10:50 MP3)