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Hey science students! Most me know that climate change has been a hot topic for
the past few years
and people tend to fall into one of two camps... either
they're worried about it or they're not and I wanted to give you an analogy to
share sort of what the scientific community is thinking...
So here we go. It's about soup. Hopefully most of you
have a soup that you like, maybe you even make soup. Maybe Soup is something that
you have as a part of a family gathering sometimes
so imagine that you're at a family gathering and there is a big pot of soup on the stove
simmering and you can smell it and it's amazing and you're just so excited about
the soup
but then you see your sneaky cousin Jimmy
coming over and adding a little bit of salt to the soup. Well at first you're like "well that's a
good thing because
soup tastes better generally when it's a little savory, right? Or a little saltiness."
But you notice that every few minutes Jimmy is coming over and adding more salt!
Another few minutes, more salt. And you're starting to get a little nervous
because you know at some point the soup is going to be ruined...
because as you've probably experienced, there's definitely such a thing as too much
salt and it ends up tasting terrible and it ruins the whole dish.
So you start letting people in the family know, "hey! Anyone else notice? Cousin
Jimmy is being a little less sneaky over here..."
And everyone is just like, "Ahhh, no, it's okay don't worry about it." And you're like,
"No. Really people. Look! Can you see what I'm seeing? Jimmy's
adding more salt to the soup; its gonna ruin the soup!" Well at some point it's going
to reach a
critical moment where you're like okay I am minutes away from having my favorite
dish
at this party totally ruined by sneaky Jimmy
with his salt. You'd be kind of upset.
That's sort of how scientists feel, I think, about the whole climate change thing...
That they know how the atmosphere works; they know how contributing
carbon dioxide to the atmosphere causes it to heat up;
and they know that we as humans are contributing carbon dioxide gas.
So it's sort of like humans are sneaky Jimmy and the soup
is our planet.