From Snowing to Knowing

A while ago, South Africa was hit by serious snow.  If you don't get why that's huge news then you probably don't live here!  We don't get snow like that.  Never.  But we did!  And everyone totally lost their shit!  Including me!

Snooooooooooooooow!!!  Look at it!  It's snow!!

That's my arm catching the 4 snowflakes that fell here.  It was awesome!!  Last time snow well in Pretoria was the 1960's so this may very well be a once in a century event.

There was a downside of course.  Suddenly facebook was filled with 2 kinds of post.  Firstly pictures like mine of people freaking out in the snow (even though people who live in places where it actually snows wouldn't have even counted what we got) and then there were posts where people were going "Ha!  Global Warming?  What a hoax!"

Misinformation and pseudoscience thrive because it sounds "common sense" and can be stated in short, pithy sayings that fit on a bumper sticker.  My replies to such things tend to fail because I try to be super thorough so my reply ends up being several pages.  Rule of thumb, people who scoff at science don't enjoy reading that much.  So I decided it's high time I learned more about Climate Change, so I could be able to offer clear, sensible answers to anti-science folks that could easily fit on a facebook comment.  Since I understand things better when I try to explain it to someone else, I'm going to figure it out by explaining it to the imaginary people who read this blog.

I should probably have posted this first since I already started yesterday...

Anyway, I got one down already!  The short answer to "Why regulate carbon dioxide?  How bad can it be, we exhale it all the time!!" is:  "Because carbon dioxide is extremely good at trapping and absorbing heat.  So if you have too much in the atmosphere, it traps too much heat, causing the planet to overheat."  I'm going to see if I can do that for the other Climate Change "gotcha!" statements too.