While debate about changes in the Earth’s temperature continue on talk radio and some Internet sites, scientists have generally come to agree that humans are contributing to climate change.
Science teacher Mike Bruckner, however, disagrees.
Bruckner said he has “understood the true reality of Earth’s cycle since the 1990s.”
He said that although the temperatures are changing, that is simply part of a natural cycle of cooling and warming created by ocean currents, which alternately heats or cools the Earth every 30 to 50 years.
“Climate change is driven by the oceans,” he said.
But Dr. Tim Savisky, an assistant science professor at Pitt who has taught about climate change in some of his courses, said these natural phenomena cannot account for the recent extreme warming the Earth has undergone.
“All of these have been examined, and the conclusion is that most of the warming is not due to any of these. What that leaves is the most reasonable human-caused reason, which is the increase in greenhouse gases due to us in the last 300 years,” Savisky said.
Bruckner points to a 1974 Time magazine article, which cited cooling temperatures and predicted a possible coming ice age. At the time, people blamed humans for the cooling, he said.
But Time revisited the issue in 2013 and acknowledged that was much more an invention of the media than it was a real scientific concern. A survey of peer-reviewed scientific papers published between 1965 and 1979 shows that the large majority of research at the time predicted that the earth would warm as carbon-dioxide levels rose — as indeed it has,” the article said.
Bruckner alleges that some scientists have changed their position on the cause of climate change, and he maintains that this was because their funding was threatened for political reasons.
Savisky asserts that although researchers do receive funds, it’s an inevitable event that should not invalidate their research.
“Climate-change deniers are “trying to make something normal, abnormal,” he said of the research funding issue.
Most scientists agree that climate change is real and if not addressed, it will be detrimental Earth and its inhabitants, Savisky said.