Global warming: are you ready to know some facts?

Question

Ok global warming is becoming a problem... with all of the polution in the air and so on... However is it as big a problem as Al Gore says? Yes polution is terrible,but will we all become like the planet Venes one day?

When Lief Erickson first discovered the New World long before Columbus, the Vikings descovered grapes growing in North America around Novia Scotia.therefore they called it Vinland. Many historians say they must have sailed further south, However England has records of citrus fruits being grown at that time in England..so we must conclude that there was a period of global warming at that time. Later in history there were accounts of global cooling and more global warming, like the seasons. In the 1980's scientist feared of a coming global ice age,but know they fear of a global warming greenhouse disaster. Polution may have increased the effects of this period of global warming, but it is just a period. Besides warmer tropical temperatures make plants grow= more oxygen.

Answer 1

According to a speech Al Gore made a while go, we are dead now... of course now his opinion has changed to a future time... until we pass that one too
But I do wish we would take care of the enviroment more

Answer 2

Facts and Myths:

Facts:
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The greenhouse effect is real.
Given that all other things stay unchanged, increased CO2 will lead to an increase in mean earth temperature.

Myth:
All other things stay unchanged.

Where does this leave us?
The people who promote global warming as a theory use models that leave out the changes that occur due to changes in CO2 levels. They have NEVER been able to a sucessful predictive model because of it. And that is what determines whether or not a theory is valid or not.

Let me give you a basic example of a feedback mechanism that they ignore. Increased levels of CO2 should lead to warmer temperatures. This leads to increased water evaporation. This lead to more condensation. The additional Condensation takes additional heat out of the atmosphere.

There are more examples, but that is the easiest one to see. The earth is full of self reguation mechanisms that keep it a relative norm.

For your information if you look at 5 year means of temperature, there hasn't been a change in over 150 years.

So don't worry about it. Most respected climatologist don't.

(From a political perspective the people who are trying to promote global warming are anti-capitalist. They are primarily communist. Al Gore is a communist. Look up info on his Dad and you can see that that apple didn't fall far from the tree.)

Answer 3

No matter how bad it gets, it will never be anything like Venus. It might be a little warmer. Maybe some of the polar ice will melt and sea level could go up 20 feet like Gore is saying. It might be that all the polar ice melts and sea levels go up a couple hundred feet, which is much worse than Gore is saying. But even in that case, life will go on. There will be massive economic problems from all the refugees from coastal cities that are flooded but life will go on. There may be more hurricanes, but life will go on. There may be massive droughts in some areas, but life will go on. But just because life will go on is no reason to put up with all those problems, if we don't have to. If we can switch to other energy sources, which we have to do some time anyway since fossil fuel will not last forever, and prevent those problems, isn't that better?

Answer 4

Quote:

"Facts:

CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
The greenhouse effect is real.
Given that all other things stay unchanged, increased CO2 will lead to an increase in mean earth temperature.

Myth:
All other things stay unchanged."

I have never heard anyone say that other things stay unchanged. Secondary effects, including atmospheric moisture, are being considered. While you're at it, consider the following things that do not stay unchanged:

As snow pack and glaciers melt, the albedo of the earth decreases. This means less radiation is reflected into space; it remains on earth, adding to warming.

The oceans are a huge reservoir of dissolved CO2 and other greenhouse gases (e.g. methane). The amount of gas that can remain dissolved in water decreases with increasing temperature. Therefore as the oceans warm up they will release more greenhouse gases, increasing global warming.

These are only a couple of the "side effects" being considered, some adding and some retarding global warming. The latest research indicates that the accelerating factors are winning.

Answer 5

So the fact it was warmer in Nova Scotia is not a good argument since it is a "regional effect", but ice cores from Antartica are a good source? I think that sounds pretty regional to me.

As for Engineer's long drawn out post. Some interesting info, since you know so much about climate modeling maybe you should be telling the scientists how to design their models. Seriously, I work closely with the Sim Center at our university and I know that climate modeling is not an exact science. Since you people like to talk so much about scientific consensus here's one, our own atmosphere is something that scientists still don't know much about. Preaching doom and gloom with only a computer model to back you up or "regional" effects does not seem like a valid argument.
Personally, I would rather look at the past, at things that have already happened, weather cycles like the original poster referred to, than to try and predict the future climate with computer models with who knows how many variables.
Oh, and please people, Wikipedia is not a source!

Answer 6

It is well documented that from about 900AD to about 1300AD the earth was a nice warm place and man thrived with an abundant food supply. Great castles and cathedrals were started, all was good. Then things changed about 1350AD. The world got cold, storms, famine and the black death severely reduced Europe's population. Bad times continued for centuries until about 1850AD when things began warming up to the climate we enjoy today. Geologists tell up ice has covered the earth during the most recent geological past. Enjoy the warmth, for in a few thousand years we will enter a galactic dust cloud and perpetual ice will again reign.

Answer 7

Global warming relates to the average temperature of the Earth. So siting some specific regional information is not really a valid counterexample. Ice cores from Antarctica show that a real connection exists between global temperature and CO2 levels.

Secondly, before we become like Venus billions of people will have died because of the climate adapting to the new global temperatures.

The EPA site
http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/index.html

Another reasonable reference.
http://www.globalwarming.org/

Answer 8

Al Gore didn't say anything about ending up like Venus, that was Stephen Hawking in China. The coastal areas will probably be flooded as Al Gore says within 50 years.

Answer 9

I have addressed this issue in several of my other answers but in this particular answer I intend to address some the rubbish that others are posting in their answers. I hope you all don't take this the wrong way but factual questions have factual answers. If you don't know what you are talking about you would be wise to remain silent.

lovingdaddyof2 sorry for picking on you but your following claim is an excellent opportunity to dispel a myth and to explore some of the real complexity of climate modeling.

You wrote: "Let me give you a basic example of a feedback mechanism that they ignore. Increased levels of CO2 should lead to warmer temperatures. This leads to increased water evaporation. This lead to more condensation. The additional Condensation takes additional heat out of the atmosphere."

This "basic example" is simply wrong. Allow me to analyze this correctly sentence by sentence below:

1) Increased levels of CO2 should lead to warmer temperatures, that much is correct.

2) This leads to increased water evaporation, also correct but it leaves out that THIS is the step that absorbs energy.

3) This leads to additional condensation, this is actually debatable as I will address below. It might. Oddly your argument would have been better if you had not made this claim as I will explain below.

4) The additional Condensation takes additional heat out of the atmosphere. This statement is simply wrong. As a matter of fact condensation puts energy back into the atmosphere. Allow me to explain it some detail.

It takes energy to evaporate a liquid. That is why you have to heat water to make it boil. You are putting energy into the water to make it vaporize. It is also the reason putting water on you skin makes it feel cold. The water evaporates and sucks heat out of your body making it cooler. I hope that convinces you that evaporation absorbs heat. Had lovingdaddyof2 been content to note that extra energy will be absorbed in the form of increased evaporation resulting in no change in temperature and left it at that he might have been closer to being right, but still not right.

Condensation on the other hand is exactly the opposite phase change and for that reason the energy flow is exactly the opposite as well. Condensation gives off heat. Vapor contains more heat than a liquid. Vapor is a bunch of molecules flying around very fast and the energy is stored as kinetic energy the energy of motion of the molecules. In a liquid the molecules are not zipping around they are quietly jiggling and flowing about a little and so store less kinetic energy. Ice stores even less energy because the molecules are hardly moving they just vibrate a bit in fixed locations in the crystal structure. You can see situations where vapor must dump heat to become a liquid. A good example is an ice filled glass of tea on which condensation forms. The condensation is forming because the water vapor in the air has found a nice cold surface where it can dump its energy and then condense.

So what does this mean with regard to lovingdaddyof2's "basic example". It means that evaporating water absorbs energy and condensing water gives the same energy back and so the cycle he describes is energy neutral. There is no net energy absorbed in the way he claims. Therefore this is not an example of feedback at all, which is why it is ignored by climate scientists.

However there is an example of feedback that he might have cited if he actually knew what he is talking about. There has been a great deal of discussion of the impact of clouds on global warming. It seems intuitive that increased evaporation of water might lead to more clouds, although this is debatable for reasons that I will not bore you with. But let us assume for sake of argument that it is true.

Clouds are white and they reflect light so maybe they would reflect more sunlight back into space creating a cooling effect that would counteract the impact of CO2. This has been one of the more difficult issues for climate modelers to understand and model correctly.

Clouds may or may not reflect light into space but might just redistribute heat by cooling the ground under the cloud but perhaps heating the atmosphere more. Clouds also can have a heat trapping effect at night. You may have noticed that clear nights can be significantly colder than overcast nights. The point is that clouds appear to have multiple and contradictory effects. The impact of clouds is therefore not well understood and it is not at all clear whether they feed back positively, negatively or are neutral in global warming. This is in fact one of the major sources of uncertainty in climate models.

Having said that very long term weather evidence is crystal clear that global temperature and CO2 levels are highly correlated strongly implying a causal link.

More recent weather records are equally crystal clear that global temperatures have been rising for about 100 years now, the exact same period that CO2 levels have been increased by human consumption of fossil fuels. Coincidence? I think not.

There is more detail in the links below.

Edit - Gekko doesn't think wikipedia is worthy of reference (see Gekko's answer below). Perhaps Gekko would have been happier if I had listed as sources the 94 references that the two wikipedia articles cite instead?

By the way Gekko, I agree that looking at past correlations is key, as does everyone else studying this issue. My long winded answer notes in the last two paragraphs the correlation between CO2 levels and global temperature both in the short and longer term. What the naysayers like yourself don't seem to understand is that climate models have never been used to predict that global temperatures are rising, the rise in temperature has been measured. The climate models have been used to try to understand why it is happening and to give us an idea of where it might be going. So far climate models have been remarkably accurate in spite of their shortcomings. Nevertheless, we do not know exactly where we will end up, so by all means, lets gamble. Well on second thought I would prefer not to.

Answer 10

yes