A reader asked us:
Regarding climate change, we know that the northern hemisphere had an ice age between 130,000 and 20,000 years ago, my question is:
- Can this registration change be periodic? Is there any type of evidence or relevant research?
- 2.- If it is periodic, are there high heat spikes that cause extreme heating?
In fact, we get a lot of questions about whether climate change is real and how we know we're not experiencing a naturally occurring cycle.
To answer these questions, we turned to Rafael Mendez Tejeda, a scientist in the fields of physics and climatology. He led research projects on North Atlantic coastal erosion, climate management, and hurricanes and established the Atmospheric Science Research Laboratory in Puerto Rico. He is also a member of the Puerto Rico Climate Change Experts and Advisory Council (CEACC), which recently submitted the final draft of Puerto Rico’s climate change mitigation plan to the Puerto Rico government.
Here is Dr. Méndez Tejeda’s response:
The earth has been suffering from climate changes. Since the unification of the continents in the Pangu era, the earth has been in constant evolution until today. Movement of the Earth's tilted axis (precession) also contributes to climate change. This movement occurs approximately every 26,000 years. Over thousands of years, periodic changes in the Earth's position relative to the Sun changed the amount of energy the Earth received, leading to ice ages and interglacial periods.
But these natural changes cannot explain the climate change we are seeing today. For one thing, the unprecedented warming we are experiencing happened very quickly, taking only about 150 years. Furthermore, changes in solar energy do not explain Earth's recent warming. This energy has decreased in recent decades, but Earth's temperature has continued to rise.
As you've read in this article, scientists have been studying global warming for decades (in fact, scientists working with Exxon predict that climate change will occur if we continue to use fossil fuels) . The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in a 2013 report that the scientific evidence for global warming is “clear” and that the main cause of this change is the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
When human civilization began, our atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million (ppm) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide, mostly from natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and fires. These levels have remained this way for nearly 6,000 years of human civilization. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, sulfur dioxide levels in the atmosphere continued to increase due to the burning of fossil fuels in factories and vehicles.
Today, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 421 ppm and continues to increase. It leads to an alarming increase in temperature because it increases the greenhouse effect which results in the Earth being unable to cool as it does not allow heat (radiation) to be released outside the atmosphere, therefore, the heat is trapped in the atmosphere like a An extra layer of blanket wraps around the Earth. This insulation means our heat index is getting higher and higher.
To answer the second part of your question “Will there be a heat spike leading to extreme warming?” the answer is Yes, that peak does exist. We have them today, caused by increased carbon dioxide, which causes the greenhouse effect. Since humans emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, this effect does not allow the Earth to cool. We are currently in the midst of the most dramatic temperature rise since the Paleocene-Eocene epoch (about 250 million years ago).
As we have seen, this happened gradually over millions of years. The peak we are experiencing occurs in less than 100 years and is what we call global warming.
July 21, 2024 was the hottest day on record, a trend that is getting stronger as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues to increase.
