Is global warming real?
Global warming, or climate change more broadly, is a fact, not a myth. It is a concrete phenomenon, a concrete process of a steady increase in average air temperatures for some observational period.
It is the rate of increase in temperatures and the direction of change, not only in temperatures but in many climate parameters. Never, at least in a few decades, if not a few hundred years, have these changes been as extremely rapid as we are observing today. As a result of these changes, we are seeing the rapid thawing of glaciers, the degradation of permafrost or, more broadly, changes in many morphoclimatic zones from the poles to the tropics.
This affects not only inanimate nature, but also flora and fauna that cannot adapt to such sudden and rapid environmental changes. This cannot be explained solely by natural cycles, which have controlled and influenced the climate for millions of years. Many of these changes today, being confident in the data we collect, can be explained by human activity, including greenhouse gas emissions. Global warming is a global challenge. It is a challenge that affects many communities and people around the world. The fight against climate change is also, in a sense, a political fight, and many decisions, many ideas of politicians that may work in the next four to five years, pitted against a particular campaign, will not necessarily lead to good solutions. Some of the prescriptions that politicians propose to us do not always listen to science. What should be done today is to think about how to help those who are suffering the most in particular. To look for such solutions and to work with scientists in order to promote the possibility of increasing prosperity in the world, in particular education and health security. And only then to look for those imaginative, innovative solutions which, as human history has shown, give us that hope that even with a challenge as great as global warming or climate change more broadly, we can cope.
Don’t believe in myths, trust science!
prof. Mateusz Strzelecki
Dr hab. Mateusz Czesław Strzelecki, prof. UWr – geographer-polar scientist, graduate of the Faculty of Geographical and Geological Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań (Master’s thesis under the supervision of prof. Andrzej Kostrzewski. He completed his PhD under the supervision of prof. Antony Long at the prestigious University of Durham, United Kingdom (2013). He devoted his habilitation to the mechanisms controlling the development of rocky coasts in polar climates and completed it at the Department of Geomorphology, University of Wrocław (headed by prof. Piotr Migoń). He has worked as a scientist in the United Kingdom, Norway (UNIS), Germany (AWI). Currently head of the Stanisław Baranowski Polar Station of the University of Wrocław on Spitsbergen, leader of Polish research teams on coastal evolution and paraglacial landscape transformation in the High Arctic, youngest member of the Polar Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has conducted research in Svalbard, Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavian and Antarctic islands and Canada. At the University of Wrocław, he carried out projects for the National Science Centre and the Foundation for Polish Science. Recipient of awards from the Foundation for Polish Science (START scholarship in 2013-14, Ministry of Science and Higher Education (scholarship for outstanding young scientists in 2013-16), UWr Rector’s Science Award (2018) and the first polar geomorphologist and researcher awarded the Crescendum Est Polonia Foundation scholarship (2009) and the Polity Science Award (2018). He is a former Vice President of the World Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS – 2008-2009), co-chair of the Working Group on Rocky Coasts of the International Association of Geomorphologists, and member of the steering committee of the SVALHOLA group – dedicated to the study of Holocene environments of Svalbard. The main objective of his research is to determine how climate change is transforming the polar coasts and threatening the existing population centres and ongoing socio-economic changes in these extremely vulnerable zones. Prof. Mateusz Strzelecki is head of the Baranowski Polar Station in Spitsbergen, and the Alfred Jahn Centre for Cold Regions Research, which opened on 29 September 2023 in the University Library building.
