Ex Astris Scientia — As an astrophysicist, what's your opinion on...

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna

Anonymous asked:

As an astrophysicist, what's your opinion on climate change? Do you think the activity of the Sun or people are the ones that cause the Earth to heat up? Can/should we even do anything about it? From what I've read, industries, agriculture etc account only for around 3% of the co2 emissions. The other 97 are from the nature (oceans, soil etc). I'm a bit confused, personally, because we all are told that greenhouse gasses are bad and we should do everything to make less of them.What do you think?

There are like 10 companies that are single handedly killing the planet and the only way to combat complete environmental catastrophe is to hold them accountable.

Plus, whoever told you those statistics were boldface lying to you.

  1. Since the beginning of industrialization, the CO2 concentration has risen from 280 ppm (the value of the previous millennia of the Holocene) to now 405 ppm.
  2. This increase by 45 percent (or 125 ppm) is completely caused by humans.
  3. The CO2 concentration is thus now already higher than it has been for several million years.
  4. The additional 125 ppm CO2 have a heating effect of 2 watts per square meter of earth surface, due to the well-known greenhouse effect – enough to raise the global temperature by around 1°C until the present.

Exxon mobil, in particular, is likely where that statistic came from.

This is an advertorial by ExxonMobil in the New York Times from 1997:

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The text to go with it read:

While most of the CO2 emitted by far is the result of natural phenomena – namely respiration and decomposition, most attention has centered on the three to four percent related to human activities – burning of fossil fuels, deforestation.

A recent publication by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes in Environmental Research Letters has systematically assessed ExxonMobil’s climate change communications during 1977–2014 and found:

We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.

Also, the ocean and land absorbs CO2

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