Some people like to/need to/can’t help but make climate change really hard to understand.
I think all you really really need to understand is a pretty basic set of facts around the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (measured in parts per million), and the temperature rises we’ve seen already, and the consequences we’ve seen.
And most of them you can get via a simple metaphor.
You are lying in bed on a Sunday morning, under one duvet: not too warm, not too cold.
In one version, your mum comes in and pulls the duvet off and says “get up you lazy bum” – you get too cold quickly. In another she coos and throws another duvet on – for a moment it feels nicer, but pretty quickly you overheat.
There’s a duvet of gases – carbon dioxide and others – that stop the Earth from being a cold barren rock (we’ve known there must be something since a French scientist did the calculations in the 1820s). By burning oil, coal and gas, we are thickening the duvet. It’s getting overheated in here. The end.
Will update this at some point, but for now (31/12/2021) it will do. Don’t let anyone bamboozle you with cherry-picked “factoirds”.
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