To My Professor: You Can’t Make Up Climate Change

This is what I should have told my climate change denialist professor in college

Back in my last semester of college, I took a class called “Introduction to Global Climate Change in the 21st Century.” I had hopes it would give me a greater grasp of the existent data about climate change. I wanted a full scope of what’s going on with the Earth’s climate, why it’s happening, and what can be done about it.

It was all fun and games at first. We revisited topics from middle school science, like the Earth’s layers and the difference between climate and weather. We discussed planets’ habitable zones, the solar system, and the Rosetta mission. Then, things took a turn quickly. When I thought we were finally going to get to the meat of it, the class turned into a series of monologues on why climate change as we know it isn’t real.

The data and hard science presented sought to convince the students that we are experiencing a naturally occurring mini-ice age and that humans are not the ones responsible for climate change. We were educated on how the Earth is presently cooler than it was 3.5 million years ago. The reason we have been witnessing shrinking ice sheets is that we are currently in an interglacial period, or so we were told. We were led to question the…