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We would not have honked.

And neither would 99 percent of the scientists who have studied the problem. This is actually not complicated. We know that global warming is real because it’s what makes life on Earth possible. About this there is no dispute. We have our little planet Earth. It is enveloped in a blanket of naturally occurring greenhouse gases that trap heat and warm the Earth’s surface. Without those gases, our planet’s average temperature would be roughly zero degrees Fahrenheit. About that there is no dispute.

We also know that this concentration of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing since the Industrial Revolution, because we can actually measure levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There is no other scientifically plausible explanation for the increase in greenhouse gases than the increased burning of fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—that began with the Industrial Revolution and surged in the last three decades with the latest stage of globalization. When the Industrial Revolution began, the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the Earth’s atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million by volume. By 2011 it was 390 parts per million. About that there is also no dispute.

This naturally had an effect on global average temperatures, which, again, we can measure. As we thickened the blanket of greenhouse gases around the Earth, it trapped more of the sun’s rays and the heat that they generated. As the Earth Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to tracking climate change, notes in its report for 2010:

The earth’s temperature is not only rising, it is rising at an increasing rate. From 1880 through 1970, the global average temperature increased roughly 0.03 degrees Celsius each decade. Since 1970, that pace has increased dramatically, to 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade. Two thirds of the increase of nearly 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) in the global temperature since the 1880s has occurred in the last forty years. And nine of the ten warmest years happened in the last decade.

The EPI report explains that global average temperature is influenced—up and down—by a number of factors besides carbon emissions, including various naturally occurring cycles involving the sun and atmospheric winds. But the current natural cycles should be causing global average temperatures to go down, not up. The recorded rise in global temperatures is therefore doubly worrying.

The EPI report concludes as follows: “Topping off the warmest decade in history, 2010 experienced a global average temperature of 14.63 degrees Celsius (58.3 degrees Fahrenheit), tying 2005 as the hottest year in 131 years of recordkeeping.” In addition, “while 19 countries recorded record highs in 2010, not one witnessed a record low temperature … Over the last decade, record highs in the United States were more than twice as common as record lows, whereas half a century ago there was a roughly equal probability of experiencing either of these.”

As the Earth’s greenhouse blanket traps more heat and raises global average temperatures, it melts more ice. According to the EPI, 87 percent of marine glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula have retreated since the 1940s. There is enough water frozen in Greenland and Antarctica to raise global sea levels by more than 230 feet if they were to melt entirely.

These are facts about which there can be no dispute. They all can be measured.

While no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change, the large number of extreme weather events of 2010 are all characteristic of what scientists expect from a steadily warming climate. Climate change, they argue, will make the wets wetter, the snows heavier, and the dries drier, because warmer air holds more water vapor and that extra moisture leads to heavier storms in some areas and even less rainfall in others. The record events in 2010 included floods in Australia and