How can global warming be a fact to people when we have climate data that maybe goes back 400 years. cycle?

Question

I guess what i am getting at is that the earth has been here for billions of years, we could be going thru a cycle that naturually happens. I wonder also the effects of volcanoes, wildfires and other natural disasters that also contribute to global warming. Has anyone found out if we are seeing more of these type of things that DO have a big impact on our enviroment.

Answer 1

Yes, the earth has been here for billions of years. But we have data going back for 650,000 on the temperature that the earth has been and the amount of CO2 that was in the atmosphere.

It's kind of cool, actually. See, they take these core samples in the ice at the poles. You can see the years in it like rings in a tree, as it froze and melted, then refroze, and then compacted as it sat there for thousands and thousands of years. Little microscopic bubbles in this ice preserved the air that was in the atmosphere at the time, and we can make all kinds of measurements of it. The thickness of the rings from the melting and refreezing, together with what we know about geological shifts, can tell us the temperature changes ages ago. It's pretty incredible, I think.

Anyway, we can tell with a huge amount of accuracy what the cycles in temperature and CO2 have been for those 650,000 years, and there have been some big shifts- several different ice ages, in fact. But the temperature always shifted in a way that pretty much paralleled the shift in CO2 in the atmosphere. In the past decades, the CO2 in our atmosphere has skyrocketed. The change is MUCH more than the change it took to mirror any of the ice ages of the past, probably three or four times as much. How can anyone characterize that as a 'natural cycle?' It simply isn't.

Edited to add: The reason answerer Bob is wrong about ocean levels falling is that much of the ice that is melting isn't in the form of icebergs- it is land-based ice, like the glaciers on Greenland and nearly the entire continent of Antarctica. When ice that has been frozen on the top of a plate of earth for thousands of years melts and runs into the oceans in huge quantities, which is what is happening, all that water is EXTRA water in the oceans that wasn't there before, not simply the same water in a different form (melted instead of frozen). That is why scientists predict that the oceans will rise.

Answer 2

I'm a climate scientist.
Volcanic eruptions cool the earth, not warm it. Generally this effect lasts a year or two for the very largest eruptions (Krakatoa, Pinatubo, etc.).

Also, it is clear from the scientific evidence that global warming is occurring. The question is what is causing it. All scientists agree that increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are at least contributing to the global warming that has occurred over the last 20-30 years.

Oh, to answer your question, everyone else is right. Ice cores, mineral records, etc. record climate data.

Answer 3

Here is something to think about don't believe me check this stuff out...

1.Water(H2O) is the only element known to man to expand when it freezes every other element contracts when it freezes so that is the first fact. For example fill a milk jugg with water, now stick it in the freezer... come back later and it will have exploded from preassure of freezing water.

2.Icebergs are massive chunks of ice, only a few percent of the ice is above water, which means the rest of the ice is underwater.

3.The ice underwater because water expands when it freezes is displacing the liquid water. So when that iceberg melts all the ice under the water will contract and fill a smaller space, so the level of the water will be less now because the ice which was displacing the liquid water is unfrozen and now occupies a less amount of space.

4.Scientific models show that if all the ice on this planet melted we would see a 3" DROP in ocean levels NOT a rise but a DROP.

Now isn't that interesting.

Now for the greenhouse gasses.

1.Plants LOVE a carbon dioxide rich air supply.

2.The more carbon dioxide their is the faster they grow.

3.Plants use photosynthesis to get their food so they can grow.

4.When the plants sense a higher level of carbon dioxide they will make up for it by sucking up more and more and one of the products of photosynthesis is OXYGEN!!

5.So no matter how much CARBON DIOXIDE there is the plants will COMPENSATE and suck up more and grow faster and bigger. and the bigger the plant is the more OXYGEN it produces through photosynthesis

Answer 4

Well, if you've seen "An Inconvenient Truth" (yea, i got suckered into seeing that lecture during summer break), you'd know that they supposedly have climate data from glaciers over the past few millions of years back, and it does indeed show that the patterns are cyclic. However, in the past 75-50 years or so, the climate data has broken this millions years old cycle and has spiked to something like triple or quadruple anything from the past million years. I'd say that it isn't quite a fact just yet, but I'd say it's fairly reliable, if based on nothing else but erring on the side of safety. Why would somebody choose not to believe in something when the scientific data suggests that ignoring it could destroy the biosphere?

Answer 5

Global warming that is of issue is a recent phenomena, starting less than 150 years ago, so climate data definitely covers the period. All of the factors you have mentioned have been analyzed and do contribute to global warming, and these have always occurred. However, we now have the additional factor of the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution which is much more a concern than the occasional transient effects of natural events.

Answer 6

The earth may have been around for billions of years, and we may have climate data going back 400 years, but the industrial revolution started just over hundred years ago. In the billions of years the earth's been around, it hasn't had to deal with this sort of pollution, ever, because we created it. The world may go through this kind of cycle all the time, but we're interfering and exacerbating it. The world may be able to balance itself out in the end, but it could take thousands or millions of years to recover and we may not survive the process.

Answer 7

Whether global warming is fact or fiction, it's COMPLETE FICTION to claim "climate data only goes back 400 years"!
We have ice cores from the poles that give clear climate records for thousands of years! (Some, paradoxically, even extend to before the earth was formed according to scripture!)

Answer 8

Go see An Inconvenient Truth. By using ice cores and other methods, scientists can go back in time to measure levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Answer 9

climate data extends back millions of years - measurements taken in ice and layers of rock can give you an idea of the general makeup of the atmosphere a long time ago.

geologic data also shows ice and sea levels from millions of years ago.

the information is out there.

Answer 10

What brought us out of the ice age? Global Warming?