Climate Change: Exclusive Interview with Katharine Hayhoe - News

KH: Back in the 1970s, a handful of scientific articles and one Newsweek story speculated that we might be headed for a period of global cooling—over the next 10,000 years or so, that is! Today, more than ten thousand scientific articles, and perhaps even millions of news stories, have shown that instead, the world is warming; and warming very quickly...In contrast, all we have to do is look at our long-term temperature records to recognize how we are currently experiencing a warming that is “off the charts” in comparison with anything we saw before the dawn of the Industrial Age. It’s warming, and it is an unnatural warming that coincides perfectly with our production of heat-trapping gases over the last 150 years.No sincere scientist who has looked at the data can claim that what we’re experiencing today resembles any natural cycle we have seen in the past. It’s interesting that some who believe in a young Earth (maybe 6,000-10,000 years old) are the same who argue that our current warming is part of a natural cycle. Both cannot possibly be true! First, if the Earth is less than 10,000 years old, there are no natural cycles that are even noteworthy. Therefore, to say this is just a natural cycle like we’ve seen in the past, we are committing to an old Earth, not a young Earth.