Global Climate Change
Global climate change refers to the ways in which average planetary weather patterns alter over time. The term global warming, though common, is a misnomer, for under some scenarios it is possible that part of the earth could cool, even as most of the planet gets warmer. The global climate change debate offers a superb case study of the relations existing in the early twenty-first century among science, technology, politics, and questions of meaning and value.
Defining the Problem
Because of the long timescales involved, climate change is difficult to experience directly; knowledge of meteorological variation generally falls under the classification of "weather." Science and technology—in forms such as the uncovering of the basic physical principles of atmospheric science, geologic evidence such as glacial moraines and plant remains, and determinations of ancient atmospheric concentrations derived from ice cores taken from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets—is needed to identify even the possibility of climate change. This fact has encouraged the assumption that both the definition of and the human response to possible climate change should be fundamentally scientific and technological in nature.
Geologists have known since the mid-nineteenth century that local, regional, and global climate undergoes change through time.
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