is global warming for real?? why do people think its not?

Question

i KNOW global warming is REAL!! and its a real problem that our children and grandchildren will face.. but why do some people refuse to believe its real?... for those that say that its natural and that the earth heats and cools by its self... its true but we are speeding up that process.. in what should take thousands of years we are doing in about a century... i want to know why some people think its not real and why its not a threat

in the 1970's scientists thought that we were entering an ice age because the temp. of the poles were getting colder.. but that was just the pole... and since then science and technology have been more accurate..

Answer 1

Benjamin N is absolutely right ... but hopefully those people will evolve into smarter people. it'll take quite a few generations i'm sure.

JoelQ is an idiot... right now i can put a sample of CO2 gas into a FT-IR and see clearly a spectrum that shows CO2 absorbs in the IR range of light. right now i can also look out my window and i can't see a darkening or some fog of CO2 which means that it doesn't absorb in the visible range. absorbtion in the IR and lack of absorption in the visible is the definition of a greenhouse gas and the fact that JoelQ tries to say CO2 is not a greenhouse gas shows how stupid he is.

if you have an opinion on global warming, ask yourself if you'd be able to believe the other side's argument if you saw sufficient scientific evidence to support it. if the answer is no, you're part of the problem (and there are people on both sides who would answer "no"). i'm a chemist and i firmly believe in global warming strictly because of the scientific evidence. i could ask around my department and i bet 90% would agree with me. dissent is vital to a discussion, but in this case the 10% are wrong.

Answer 2

Whewn I was in grade school in the 1960s, we were taught that we were going into another ice age. Now it's all about global warming.

When I was 12 I watched a TV show inwhich a climatologist said that we were not going into another ice age. The world would warm up for 25-30 years then start to cool off again. He showed what the world climate had done over several hundred years.

I heard people complaining about how hot it was today and how it never gets this hot in S. Calif. That's bologna! It was 119 here where I live and I can remember it being this hot about 15 years ago!

The Earths climate has cycles. Like the seasons, it has a heating and cooling cycle that works on about a 50-60 year cycle. In another 25 or 30 years everyone will be screaming ICE AGE again!!

Answer 3

the people you are referring to may be ignorant and may not have read enough or the right things about global warming... they might know only part of the issue and thereby shrug it off as some issue as important as a mole-hill thats been hyped to be a mountain of an impending disaster.
a few degrees increase in temperature is not just a question of comfort but a concern about changes in the patterns of rainfall and other weather phenomena. While there are droughts in places that had reasonable amounts of rainfall there are floods where there used to be well-fed rivers. how would anybody in a city that gets all the power, food and water ever realise what is happening to the places where all this comes from. These people don't live there or those who do may not know the reason why there is a change.

Answer 4

People have a tendency to ignore an impending danger rather than stand up and face the truth. They may have the smug feeling that at least whatever is going to happen won't happen in their lifetimes and so they can live as they wish. People are more busy here attending to their private lives and how to uplift their status in society. For them, the world is a very small place which is composed of their own homes, workplaces and recreational centres. They either cannot or do not think about the larger aspects of life as their minds are pathetically shallow. Even if they think about these problems, they think about them in a passive sort of way, thinking that somebody else will take care of the problem, I'm only a common citizen. What can I do? People don't even know what can cause harm to them directly here. Otherwise they would have refrained from taking drugs, cigarettes and so on and so forth. How can you expect them to be aware of a problem which will affect people two generations after them?

Answer 5

Your question has generated lots of heat on its own. Unfortunately, the issue of global warming is a touchstone for all sorts of cranks (most of them deniers) with political agendas. these people stick to their ideas with a loyalty usually reserved for sports teams and religions. It seems to be an unfortunate fact of human nature.

Yes, global warming is real. It is the measured outcome of a number of competing and interrelated processes, for which there were and have been many unknowns. But the data are in, and it is happening. By the way, I am in the Canadian rockies right now, and the weather here is very warm--the poor canucks are sweating out a 90 F heatwave. The glaciers have receeded, etc etc. But these ANECDOTAL reports are worthless: what matters are global, long-term statistics. These unambiguously show a warming trend which coincides with the accelerating industrialization of the earth and which dwarfs anything seen in the fairly well-established historical record for a comparable timescale.

Anyone who can read a graph can understand the data. Unfortunately most people can't or won't--educational budget cuts, you see, or simple narrowmindedness. After all, they may not accept evolution either.

Answer 6

there have been 4 ice ages, and after every one the earth heated up and melted the glaciers.

There is global warming on mars, the ice caps of co2 have shrunk. Is that also our fault?

currently the sun is heating up and that is what is accounting for global warming on mars and earth. To me, it's reasonable to expect the same warming on earth as there is on Mars, due to the sun's increase in temp.

The only real greenhouse gas is H2O. CO2 is measure in parts per million, i.e. there is none as far as global warming is concerned. We may be increasing CO2, but we aren't increasing H2O vapor, the only significant green house gas. No real scientist in this area believes global warming is a human made problem. All of Al Gore's "Scientists" that believe in glogab warming are in other fields, not their area of expertise.

You are just looking for problems where there are none. Everything on earth is in some kind of cycle. It buffers itself and keeps everything in check.

Answer 7

Here are some reasons that I've heard.

The second coming is happening soon enough that it doesn't mater.
There hasn't been enough scientific studies to prove it.
It's not something that I have any control over, so why should I care.
The carbon dioxide / monoxide that we are pumping into the air, changes into oxygen through photo syntheses in plants so it's not a long term problem.
It's just a thing that environmentalists made up because that have to find excuses to stop pollution.

Answer 8

in (oops) the 1970's it was a 'fact' in the media that we were entering a new ice age wonder what we will 'know' in 2020..............in the 1980's some scientist claimed that the CO2 that we were pumping into the atmosphere was delaying the ice age ( did we go too far?)

Answer 9

I don't notice a thing. I just love 90 degree days....in december

Answer 10

There is no such thing.
The earth will heat up and cool down just as it always has.