13 Ways To Know If Global Warming Is Real

Oh, it’s real.  The evidence is horrifying.  We are in a global emergency that most of us are unaware of.  We need to take action now to save humanity and wildlife.

Julie Smith, 5/18/26

This is a summary of Chapter 15, The Skies Above, in the book, “2050: What’s it Gonna Be?”.  You can download the full chapter, as well as other chapters.  References are here.

After decades of increasingly obvious man-made changes for the worse in our atmosphere from our uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels, a few extremely observant and prescient scientists began to notice the connection.  This was back in the mid-1900’s.  Further study revealed the phenomena of greenhouse gases, and that they actually trapped the sun’s heat as it was reflected back towards outer space, holding it within Earth’s atmosphere and causing the atmosphere to gradually warm up.  At first, the science was dismissed out of hand as speculative at least, alarmist at worst and certainly unproven. But then, as temperatures did indeed begin to increase, the science was proven to be correct and not just alarmist.

However, the fossil fuels industry didn't want to hear it, and preferred to continue business as usual, so that they could continue growing their wealth, even though it meant stealing the future for all life on the planet and destroying our climate.  So, they hired some sleezy merchants of doubt,¹ of the same scummy ilk that cast doubt on the adverse impacts of smoking on health, to dupe the public into thinking all was just fine and dandy, no problem here.  Since we humans just love burning fossil fuels, and are really good at filtering out what we don’t want to hear and hearing what we do want to hear, we just kept on keeping on and ate the big corp baloney until we were choking on it.

And, here we are.  We are now killing our entire planet and all its life, including ourselves, without doing too much about it.  In part because most of us have absolutely no clue how bad things really are.  Mainly because it doesn’t get much coverage in the media.  Or at least not the absolute emergency coverage that it deserves, given that we’re actually taking out our entire planet and, by extension, our own species.  Just wow.  A head-shaker for sure.  Perhaps it’s because the public finds sports and reality TV so much more interesting.  Although it’s fair to say that the increased storms, fires and destruction that’s resulting from our collective complacency can be pretty interesting, it’s more about the entertainment aspects that come from watching others suffer, and is rarely linked to fossil fuels or our own individual choices, if ever.  It’s pretty fascinating, if you think about it.

What it gets down to is, if we want to save our earth, we’re going to have to do it ourselves.  We’re going to have to grow up, get past the complacency and take matters into our own hands.  It’s entirely up to us, at the end of the day.  We have to each reduce our carbon footprints significantly and commit to families of two or fewer children.  Reducing our carbon footprint by definition means using less fossil fuel, which would in theory drive the ultra-wealthy scumbags that are responsible for this out of business.  And a huge part of that is not buying stuff we don’t need.  Which should be simple.  Think about that.  You can make decisions every day that save you money and save the planet.

The latest update on COP26 shows that, per the commitments of all the parties combined, we can expect to see an increase in global CO₂ emissions of 13.7% by 2030, compared to 2010.⁶  Ouch.  This is pretty hopeless, considering that we need at least a 25% reduction in emissions just to keep the temperature increase below 2 ºC, and we need an even bigger reduction, of 45%, to keep the temperature within the 1.5 ºC limit.  Does it look like global governments are going to get this done?  After working on it for the past 10 years and accomplishing nothing?  Nope, I don’t think so either.

One of the biggest problems that I believe drives the lack of urgency around our global emergency is misinformation and lack of information. The lies and misinformation dispersed by unethical scientists who choose to whore themselves off to the big corporations, including the oil industry, that don't want us to know how bad the problem is just amazes me. If there's a god, I imagine that they are not impressed with these slime bags. However, greed is clearly a powerful thing. The lack of media attention, also driven by greedy big corporations that control the media, is another big reason why we remain brainwashed and clueless. It's truly scary how complacent we've really become.

Here are 13 ways to know if global warming is real. These are separate sources of information that are pulled together by different government agencies, paid for with our tax dollars. This evidence of global warming is hard to argue with. Just saying. As if things weren’t scary enough, it looks like science actually underestimated the actual rate of global warming, which is understandable, since we severely lack true life experience on this particular issue and how it actually plays out.  Like all science, the science of global warming is unfolding before our eyes, and each day something new is learned, and then followed up on, leading to yet more discoveries.  Sort of like the PFAS thing in the previous chapter.  Or Einstein’s theory of relatively.  Only different.

1. Thawing of Arctic Permafrost. To make it even worse, it’s melting at unexpectedly rapid rates, as scientists are discovering destabilized landscapes where permafrost that was thawing at a few inches per year is now suddenly thawing abruptly at 10 feet per year.  Is that freaking scary or what?  I mean, really?  It sort of flies in the face of the alarmist climate sensationalism promoted by climate deniers.  Dontcha think?

2. Receding Sea Ice in the Arctic. Part of the reason that climate models have underestimated the increasing rate of global warming is that the scientists didn’t know about things like the warming in the Arctic ocean, that’s been going on since the early 1900’s.⁹  Since 1979, the sea ice has been receding at about 12% per decade, and now it’s accelerating.¹⁰

3. Melting of Greenland Ice Sheet. The warming Arctic air and surrounding water is also increasing the rate of melting of the Greenland ice sheet,¹¹ and the thinning ice sheets are leading to a vicious cycle in which the water underneath the glaciers is increasing and flowing into the oceans, as well as lubricating the bottoms of the glaciers creating a lubrication effect so that they slide into the oceans faster.

4. Melting of Antarctic Ice Sheet. Scientists have found that melting ice in the Antarctic could slow down the water circulation in the ocean’s deeper parts, which would in turn slow down the overturning circulation around Antarctica and accelerate global warming and sea level rise even more.²³ 

5. The Death of Coral Reefs. In the past 20 years, 80% of coral has been lost.  This is pretty scary, because coral reefs provide about half the planet’s oxygen, which pretty much all animals, including us, require for life.  The coral is dying from bleaching due to global warming, and from a new form of cyanobacterial disease, possibly driven by stress from the warming. 

6. Changes to North Atlantic Ocean Currents. Similar to Antarctic currents.

7. Receding Mountain Glaciers. In Glacier National Park, climate change has reduced the number of glaciers from 150 in 1850 to 26 today.  

8. Increasing Temperatures. These are hard to argue with too, after all, temperature is temperature. The temperatures near the poles of the planet are increasing the fastest, and are around 7 ºF higher than they were 50 years ago. Local hot days are increasing, in France, the hottest recorded temperature was 104 ºF early this century and now it's 114 ºF. Heat-related deaths are increasing. The past ten years have been the hottest on record, and in the Southwestern U.S., days with triple-digit temperatures are arriving weeks sooner, and continuing weeks later than they did 100 years ago. 

9. Increasing Droughts. Severe drought across the globe is hurting agriculture and killing aquatic species as reservoirs and rivers dry up, including the Danube, the Po, the Rhine and the Thames, in the worst drought in 500 years.  Drought in the Amazon (yes, THE Amazon) is pushing the entire ecosystem over a tipping point as I write this.  Rainfall is steadily decreasing in the U.S. Southwest, leading to predictions of a snowless future, even in the mountains.  So much for ski season.

10. Disease Vectors Increasing. The high temperatures are also allowing disease vectors like tics and mosquitoes to spread into areas where they previously couldn’t survive.¹⁹   Mosquito season is also extending later into fall, which obviously increases the risk of mosquito-borne diseases like West Nile virus, malaria, dengue fever and eastern equine encephalitis.

11. Sea Level Rise. In the past 100 years, sea level has risen 6 – 8 inches²¹ because the world’s glaciers are melting from the poles to the mountains.  Just since 2000, the glaciers have released more than 5.3 trillion metric tons of water into the oceans.²²  Does that sound like a lot?  It is.  Even on a global scale, it’s a lot.  And now we can expect at least another 5 inches by 2100 if we continue our current behaviors. 

12. Extreme Weather. I’m assuming that most of us have noticed some differences in the weather patterns here on planet Earth.  After all, the media is really good about sensationalizing extreme weather events.  All the death, destruction and drama, who can resist?  We don’t miss much about the extreme tornado seasons, the extreme hurricanes, the atmospheric rivers, heavy rains, flooding and landslides.  We even hear a little about extreme droughts, but not as much as all the other stuff with all that excitement and entertainment as we find ourselves drawn like a magnet and glued to TV screens or our phones, checking out the cool pictures of upside down houses and submerged vehicles.  Sometimes all this death and destruction even gets linked to climate, and the idea that we’re seeing more and extreme weather all the time because of climate change, and that it’s not our imagination.  This is rare, and depends on your choice of media. The reality is that we are indeed seeing more extreme weather, and it’s definitely linked to climate change caused by us humans.  The fact is, warmer air holds more moisture, and water is also a greenhouse gas, so increasing water in the atmosphere is amplifying the effects of all the other greenhouse gases and accelerating global warming.  Something like a runaway nuclear reactor.  This is why extreme weather events are happening more and more often, and this trend of increased intensity and higher frequency will continue to increase throughout the rest of our lives on this planet.

13. Hurricanes are getting so bad that climatologists are arguing for another category, the latest and greatest “Category 6” storm.²⁸  The one foot rise in east coast sea level in the past hundred years may not seem like much, but it’s estimated that the damage from hurricane Ian was $50 billion more than it would have been without the higher sea level.

Obviously, there’s no time to lose here.  Each and every one of us can change the terrible path we’ve put our planet on, but we have to do it now.  Following chapters in the book "2050: What's It Gonna Be?", will dig into the specific impacts of our choices and changes that we can easily make to put a stop to increased CO₂e emissions and help our planet.  I hope you take it to heart and take some action to help turn this mess around, as best we can at this point.