Reply W/150 wrds

The thing that stood out to me the most in the reading was "post hoc ergo proctor hoc." We live in a society today where jumping to conclusions is almost a hobby for some people, especially internet personalities. It's very easy to say "well, event A happened, then B happened, so obviously A caused B." It is much harder to do the research into causation and figure out exactly why either event happened.

One place that I have seen this recently is with global warming or "rapid climate change." It is "common knowledge," and reported by many scientific communities that CO2 emissions are up 50% in the last 200 years and global warming is following CO2 rapidly. (NASA, 2022) I bet that it would surprise some people to find that the scientific community is actually divided on this topic. There is a growing body of research that shows the rise in atmospheric CO2 actually follows the rise in global temperatures by almost a thousand years. (Jones, 2022) So the question becomes: Does global warming cause atmospheric CO2 to rise, or does increased CO2 cause the planet to warm?

This claim is one of the main talking points of climate change deniers, and it brings up an interesting point about post hoc ergo proctor hoc. How is it possible to not know what is causing climate change? Something that is so "commonly known." It comes back to the topic at hand and the lack of time spent by the average person critically thinking about deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Topics like this one, that cannot yet be proved by science, leave much room for debate, and most average people will tend to believe the loudest person in the room.

The book goes on to ask: What if there is a common cause? That is most likely the scenario with rapid climate change, increased temperature releases CO2 from the oceans, which in turn raises the temperature, and the cycle repeats. Without looking deeper and evaluating the reasoning behind each possible scenario, this most likely outcome is unreachable.