Can you prove that global warming is caused by us (humans)?

Question

Try to keep in mind that history has shown cyclical warming and cooling trends, so the temperature rising does not count as proof.

Also, Can you even prove that a warming trend is detrimental?

Answer 1

There are different levels of proof, of course. But no. Nobody can prove beyond any kind of doubt the humans are causing global temperature increases. Likewise, there are many things that a global increase in temperature would benefit, such as agriculture with longer and better growing periods.

What CAN be said pretty definitively is that the RATE of global warming is pretty out of whack. There are LOTS of indicators in almost every field to suggest that temperature increases of this magnitude occur naturally either only in extremely rare circumstances or not at all. Whether you look at plant migration rates (yes, they move to other climates when their gets too hot), deposits of atmospheric gases, or fossilized features, you have to go back millions of years to see anything like we see now. Yes, it's been this hot before, but last time it took CENTURIES to change, not decades.

The main fear of global warming is that it won't stop. IF the recent trend is caused by increases in atmospheric gases and the like (as it seems to correlate to) then continuing to disturb things could easily continue to make things worse. A couple degrees of difference won't be so bad, but what about ten or twenty? Or even a hundred? The Earth's been that hot before too... do you really want to sit idly by and see if it happens again? Or would it be better to stop it while we still can?

Answer 2

First, try to keep in mind that history has shown that whenever there is a global catastrophe that affects human lives, it usually involves both natural phenomena and human activities. For example, although water in rivers, lakes, and bays natural experience cyclical rising and falling, humans can worsen the effect of natural trends by damming rivers and lakes and by building communities close by. Saying that a flood was caused by naturally occuring rain does not mean that humans did not contribute to the devestation the flooding caused.

No one says that all global warming is caused by humans. Some of it is cyclical, but the effects are worsened by human activities. There have been numerous scientific studies on this, and the preponderance of the evidence points to a human contribution.There is some disagreement about how severe global warming -- or global catastrophic weather, as it may as well be called -- will be and when the effects will take place, but pretty much everyone but a few over-reported crackpots admit that there is a human element to the phenomenon.

Answer 3

I don't think that anything can be proven just by taking measurements and collecting data. This is what is usually referred to either correlationary research or ex post facto research. The only way to scientifically prove cause and effect is a controlled experiment. And unfortunately, to do this with something like global warming on a planetary scale, we would need at least three planets identical to earth: one that we would pollute the crap out of, one that we would moderately pollute, and one that would have no development. Then each planet would have to be controlled so that nothing happened on one planet that didn't happen on the other two, other than the pollution.

So yes, in other words, that's not gonna happen.

If the world relied on correlationary studies to determine facts, we'd be in the dark ages still. Think of all the things in the world that seem to go hand-in-hand: like not eating, and having anorexia... does one cause the other, or does some other factor cause both?http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_implies_causation gives quite a few examples.

In diagnosing children with 'failure to thrive', doctors once labelled the causes as medical or social, until they realized that they couldn't pinpoint the exact cause of the condition because both factors most often coexisted and affected each other.

In my oppinion, global warming is exactly the same, because there are two hypotheses about the cause of global warming, and we only have ex post facto correlationary data, we cannot independently examine each hypothesis, and thus cannot prove that greenhouse gases are causing current warming trends.

That said, we have a responsibility to err on the side of cautiousness. Remember grandma saying over and over that it is better to be safe than sorry? Just as we can't prove definitively that smoking marijuana or cigarrettes, or drinking alcohol during pregnancy will result in something bad happening to the child, no caring mother would consider it wise to endanger her unborn child unnecessarily. We have the exact same responsibility to the earth, if not even more so.

Answer 4

At this point now that we do know that it is happening, I see no reason that we should even have to bother proving that Humans are the sole or even main cause. I say this because we do know that it is happening, whether from "cyclic warmings" as you mention, or strictly from "greenhouse" gases, etc. We do know that "we" create most of the greenhouse gases that are "accelerating" this and because of the consequences that will come to us from global warming catastrophy wise, we need to act. In other words if we do out best to "remove" our contribution to it we can at best reverse it, and at worse, simply slow it down. Either option is a good thing because of the conswquences to mankind and nature if it continues. If we stop it then that is wonderful. If we slow it down that is also great on two fronts. First is that the reduction in pollution alone by using cleaner sources of energy that we need to develop will help the health of the entire planet through reduced pollution. Second is that the slowing down of the global warming would give us more time to attempt to lessen the damage to ourselves as many cities will be submerged as well as major croplands, Species will die and vanish, Food will be hard to grow, and all the associated things that go along with this. At this point the arguement is over as far as I'm concerned because for the first time in human history, we have the ability to at the very least dramatically affect negative climate change on the entire planet, all the while ridding outselves of polluting sources of energy that are not good for us in the first place, and are also horribly inefficient as well. "Everybody" in my opinion would do themselves a huge favor if they did go watch Al Gore's movie. We can argue all day over who is at fault, but we have no arguement when it comes to what we can do about it and whether or not it will at least help. This is the single greatest "engineering" opportunity that has been offered to man since we crawled out of the ooze millions of years ago. Let's not blow our chance to show what we are made of!

Answer 5

no, it has not been proven that global warming is caused by humans or us putting stuff into the atmosphere. There is more proof on the side that the world just normally goes thru climate changes. That doesn't change the fact that something IS happening out there in that we have drought in some places and there are spots in the oceans where the lack of oxygen is killing fish.

On the other hand we don't know exactly when these changes will occur, or even know that we won't be plunged into extremely cold weather either. We'll have the information just before it happens so be prepared to go either way.

Answer 6

Maybe human activity is just speeding up the process which may basically be due to periodical changes in solar radiation.
Apart from stop burning almost everything, including our forests, which in addition to warming is polluting our atmosphere, we could do something to slow down or diminish global warming.
The priority is to find a solution, not to find who is guilty.
My suggestion is that we could screen part of the solar radiation by putting into an equatorial orbit between the tropics some kind of light reflecting particles.
Mathematical models should be used, or the particles should be put into orbit gradually in order to measure the results and check the consequences.
The particles themselves should decay or fall from their orbit after some time, in order to avoid their permanence in orbit forever.
My feeling is that such solution could be achieved much more quickly than a global consensus and effective action against greenhouse emissions.

Answer 7

Airtight proof to mathematical standards of rigor is impossible. However, a very strong circumstantial argument can be constricted from the scientific understanding of the role of greenhouse gases in global warming, along with models of how human activities have affected those gases.

Keep in mind also that temperatures rising over a significant portion of the globe IS the definition of global warming, and that the upwards trends you refer to historically ARE episodes of global warming. You need to tidy up your definitions here.

Answer 8

The concept of global warming is very simple, and I don't think anyone in the scientific community would dispute the fact that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause warming of the earth. In fact, the concept is easily and often explained in introductory chemistry, biology or geography classes every day (and that is not propaganda, its simple science.)

Also, no one can honestly argue that humans do not produce large quantities of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere every day.

Most importantly, it has been WELL documented that global temperatures are rising (whether you believe this to be "natural" or not).

And to answer your question of whether this would be detrimental, it depends on whether you think millions of people dying from famine (disruptions in agricultural production), drought (desertification), displacement (from changes in food production, the wars that will result from famine, or even the simple rising of sea levels), disease (as evidenced by unusual migratory patterns of insects carrying diseases to areas that were previously not habitable by those species) is "detrimental" or not. I suppose that's a personal debate you will have to have with yourself.

Can you argue that it would benefit anyone?

Given that increasing temperatures HAVE been proven (regardless of cause), and that we know carbon dioxide can play a role in that, and that climate change (again, regardless of cause) is likely to be "detrimental" to many millions of people, it seems a non-issue to me whether humans are to blame or not for the changes we are seeing. The issue, to me, is what can we do about it? And if curbing our production of carbon dioxide can offset some of the impact of these changes, then what difference does it make whose fault it is?

Answer 9

Absolutely not. As of today attempts at climate modeling been met with failure. The climate of the earth is so incredibly complex, undergoes so many warming and cooling trends over the course of billions of year, it is impossible to predict. No credible scientist will claim that they can prove global warming is caused by humans and no one can prove global warming is detrimental.

On the contrary, we say that the phenomenon of global warming (as a scientific theory) is necessary for life on this planet. Without the natural greenhouse effect, the mean temperature of the earth would be approximately -15 to -20 degrees C. There is no consensus (in the scientific community) whether humans have increased this effect and subsequently caused temperature increase. There is however a consensus that the largest contributor to greenhouse effect is not CO2, but water vapor (see reference) - this fact is surprising to most people.

Without going into a huge amount of detail, I have referenced a peer-reviewed scientific journal article that summarizes the debate concisely. As a scientist myself, I would encourage people not to use websites (or even newspapers) in researching this politically-charged issue as there is an enormous amount of misinformation present on the internet that is politically motivated.

On that note, one of the most import part of the answers to this question is to distinguish whether the answer is supported by science or environmental socialism. The former uses the scientific method to show evidence (not prove) for support or rejection of a hypothesis. The later is NOT SCIENCE and based on political ideology. A great example of this is the movie often cited by environmental socialists, "An Inconvenient Truth". This movie is presented as fact, when scientists have refuted large portions. This includes such claims (slides in his presentation) as the simulated sea level pictures have been subsequently proven to be physically impossible. Remember, Al Gore is NOT A SCIENTIST, he is a politician. Obviously there are offenders on the other side of the political spectrum as well.

Answer 10

For the most section. the reason why there is international warming is because human beings freeing many risky cemicals in to the air, which come from many components from burning fossil fuels to utilizing hairspray. all of them emit elements which reason a eco-friendly living house effet on to the earth. What lets do is to, use a more desirable effcient way of transportation. lets walk,ridea motorcycle, get a vehicle that would not emmit cemicals [electric powered vehicle or use public transportation. We we use electrical energy, lets get photo voltaic pannels yet on the roofs of our residences,this is going to diminish your electric powered bill.too. after we were given to the keep, use reusable luggage really of waisting the plastic/paper in which the luggage are made from. Use the three R's REDUSE, REUSE,RECYCLE