“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

The sun heats Earth. Earth re-radiates heat back into space. Carbon dioxide absorbs some of that heat and emits it to Earth again. That’s global heating. It’s happened for billions of years. But people have been adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for the last two centuries, accelerating in the last few decades. Earth’s temperature is rising as a result. At current emission rates, by the end of the century it will have risen enough to melt Antarctic glaciers and flood every coastline in the world with 10 feet of water and more. If we wait until it the West Antarctic Ice Sheet cracks free, it will be too late to stop the flooding.

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Most of the willful ignorance peddled as climate skepticism fudges the evidence that global temperatures have risen. That, however, is far down the chain of causes. If I put a blanket on, I will retain more heat. How much heat, in how much time, depends on my temperature, the room’s temperature, and how well the blanket insulates. But there is no arguing that I will retain more heat. The only question is, how fast?

The way that carbon dioxide (CO2) blankets the Earth is figurative, not literal. Nevertheless, there is a literal, everyday comparison to something that very few doubt: the workings of a microwave oven. We have turned the microwave on with us in the oven, and there is no timer.

Microwave ovens work by radiating their contents with microwave radiation, usually at 2.45 gigahertz (GHz)—a wavelength of 122 millimeters (4.80 in). At that wavelength, water molecules (per wiki) “rotate as they try to align themselves with the alternating electric field of the microwaves. Rotating molecules hit other molecules and put them into motion, thus dispersing energy. This energy, when dispersed as molecular vibration in solids and liquids (i.e., as both potential energy and kinetic energy of atoms), is heat.” In a microwave, water receives energy from the microwave radiation, heats up, and re-radiates that heat to other nearby molecules of protein, carbohydrates, and fats.

Everything in the universe emits a spectrum of radiation based on its temperature. It’s called black body radiation. For a skin temperature of 80F, people emit peak radiation at a wavelength of 9.65 microns – which is how infrared optics work, by picking up that radiation and converting it to visible wavelengths. The surface of the sun is much hotter, about 10,000F, so its peak radiation is at about ½ micron. Earth absorbs radiation from the sun, heating it to a mean temperature of 60F, and then re-radiates some of that energy.

While black body radiation has a clear peak, it is distributed along a range of wavelengths in a curve. Earth’s peak radiation is at 10 microns, but emits some energy at higher and lower wavelengths: 95% of the energy is emitted between 6 and 60 microns. As it happens, CO2 absorbs radiation at 15 microns and re-radiates it: half goes out into space and half is re-radiated back to Earth, heating the planet. The more CO2 in the air, the more energy is retained.

That’s how global heating works – the more CO2, the thicker the blanket and the hotter we get. Who asked for this thicker blanket? Where did it come from?

‘History isn’t dead. It’s not even past.‘ – William Faulkner

Not as well-known as microwave ovens, carbon dating is how scientists gauge the age of some long-dead life. As a chemical element, carbon comes in several isotopes. The mix of isotopes in an object tells how long it’s been dead. Isotopic analysis tells us that.

The most common form (or isotope) of carbon, ¹²C, has an atomic weight of 12, and is stable. There is also a heavier stable version, ¹³C, and a still heavier radioactive version ¹⁴C, that decays to ¹²C with a half-life of 5,730 years. Living animals and plants constantly have their ¹⁴C replenished from the air and water, but dead things lose theirs. Samples of dead life can be tested for how much ¹⁴C is present. The less there is, the longer the sample has been dead. In 1960, Willard Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for figuring this out in the late 1940s. There are other elemental isotopes with longer half-lives that are used to date older samples, like potassium-argon and uranium-lead. Regardless, the principle is the same.

Back to carbon: It seems that plants prefer ¹²C to ¹³C. They have about 2% less ¹³C than is in the atmosphere. So as fossil fuels are burned, the ancient carbon is released into the atmosphere and dilutes the ¹³C. From RealClimate: “[A]t no time in the last 10,000 years is the ¹³C/¹²C ratios in the atmosphere as low as they are today. Furthermore, the ¹³C/¹²C ratios begin to decline dramatically just as the CO₂ starts to increase — around 1850 AD. This is exactly what we expect if the increased CO₂ is in fact due to fossil fuel burning.”

Moreover, it’s not as if we’ve been replacing ¹³C with ¹²C. All the original ¹³C and ¹²C are still there. We’ve added to it – to levels not seen in over 15 million years.

Therefore, what we get is more carbon dioxide with a smaller fraction of ¹³C all the time. The only way for that to happen is for the ancient ¹³C – free carbon to be released, via human combustion of fossil fuels.  As of May 30, 2026, Mauna Loa was at 432.00 PPM – 2.29 PPM higher than this time last year; 23.96 PPM over 10 years ago; and 150 PPM higher than the pre-industrial levels.

We are frogs in a boiling pot, we lit the fire, and we are still adding more fuel it.

The heating changes the flow of currents in the ocean and atmosphere, and hence temperatures and precipitation worldwide. On the whole, it raises agricultural productivity, but by changing how heat and water are distributed it disrupts all the agriculture on the planet that has to move to hotter, cooler, wetter, or dryer places when changes happen. The biggest problem, though, is the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. If they all melt, sea levels will rise 300 feet and flood all the lowland on the planet. Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi will be under water. That will all take centuries to happen. However, like following a car on the highway, we have to leave space and time to react if the car in front of us hits the brakes. If we’re too close, we won’t be able to avoid a collision.

Glaciers aren’t monolithic. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet, if it melts, will raise sea levels by over ten feet. That would flood every coastal city in the world. If we don’t stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, the ice sheet will melt within a century. More worrisome, if we wait until it detaches from the mainland ice to cut the heating, it’s too late. If we want to avoid that future, we have to cut back the CO2 we put into the air. Now. Otherwise, Astoria, Seaside, Tillamook, Lincoln City, Newport, Coos Bay, Brookings – buh bye.