(Portage County OH)

These days, with questions being raised about the truth of all kinds of reports, we begin this section with an affirmation of the science supporting reports of disruption of our climate.  Measurements over the last 150 years have indicated vast changes to the planet.

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• "Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in greenhouse gas levels. Ancient evidence can also be found in tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and layers of sedimentary rocks. This ancient, or paleoclimate, evidence reveals that current warming is occurring roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.

• The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.4 Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with the six warmest years on record taking place since 2014. Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year — from January through September, with the exception of June — were the warmest on record for those respective months

• Sea levels have risen (on average)  0.13 inches (3.3 millimeters) per year, more than twice as fast as at the beginning of the twentieth century.

• The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost an average of 286 billion tons of ice per year between 1993 and 2016, while Antarctica lost about 127 billion tons of ice per year during the same time period. The rate of Antarctica ice mass loss has tripled in the last decade."  [https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence]

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The four graphs below show some of the measures indicating dramatic changes over the last hundred years  humans have been using fossil fuels.

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