GLOBAL WARMING : What is causing it ?

Question

It is getting pretty hard to deny it is happening.

Polar bears face meltdown
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-12-27-polar-bears_x.htm?csp=34

Immense ice shelf breaks off in Canadian Arctic
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061229/wl_canada_afp/canadaarctic

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So what's causing it ?

A. An increase in solar activity in the form of larger solar flares.

B. A magnetic pole shift accompanied by a decrease on Earth's magnetic field.

C. Green House Gases (man made or natural).

D. All of the above.

E. Other, please specify.


Please support your answer with data, studies, facts, or something that will shed new light on the problem.

Planetary Alignment and Magnetic Field Interaction
http://www.allanstime.com/UnifiedFieldTheory/Planets_Alignment/

Answer 1

The correct answer is A, C and E. Here's the definitive sources on the topic:

http://www.nap.edu/execsumm_pdf/11175.pdf
http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/climate-change-final.pdf

Answer 2

Did global warming stop in 1998?



The official thermometers at the U.S. National Climate Data Center show a slight global cooling trend over the last seven years, from 1998 to 2005.

Actually, global warming is likely to continue—but the interruption of the recent strong warming trend sharply undercuts the argument that our global warming is an urgent, man-made emergency. The seven-year decline makes our warming look much more like the moderate, erratic warming to be expected when the planet naturally shifts from a Little Ice Age (1300–1850 AD) to a centuries-long warm phase like the Medieval Warming (950–1300 AD) or the Roman Warming (200 BC– 600 AD).

The stutter in the temperature rise should rein in some of the more apoplectic cries of panic over man-made greenhouse emissions. The strong 28-year upward trend of 1970–1998 has apparently ended.

Fred Singer, a well-known skeptic on man-made warming, points out that the latest cooling trend is dictated primarily by a very warm El Nino year in 1998. “When you start your graph with 1998,” he says, “you will necessarily get a cooling trend.”

Bob Carter, a paleoclimatologist from Australia, notes that the earth also had strong global warming between 1918 and 1940. Then there was a long cooling period from 1940 to 1965. He points out that the current warming started 50 years before cars and industries began spewing consequential amounts of CO2. Then the planet cooled for 35 years just after the CO2 levels really began to surge. In fact, says Carter, there doesn’t seem to be much correlation between temperatures and man-made CO2.

For context, Carter offers a quick review of earth’s last 6 million years. The planet began that period with 3 million years in which the climate was several degrees warmer than today. Then came 3 million years in which the planet was basically cooling, accompanied by an increase in the magnitude and regularity of the earth’s 1500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger climate cycles.

Speaking of the 1500-year climate cycles, grab an Internet peek at the earth’s official temperatures since 1850. They describe a long, gentle S-curve, with the below-mean temperatures of the Little Ice Age gradually giving way to the above-the-mean temperatures we should expect during a Modern Warming.

Carter points out that since the early 1990s, the First World’s media have featured “an increasing stream of alarmist letters and articles on hypothetical, human-caused climate change. Each such alarmist article is larded with words such as ‘if’, ‘might,’ ‘could,’ ‘probably,’ ‘perhaps,’ ‘expected,’ ‘projected’ or ‘modeled’—and many . . . are akin to nonsense.”

Carter also warns that global cooling—not likely for some centuries yet—is likely to be far harsher for humans than the Modern Warming. He says, “our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 percent of the last 2 million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.”

Since the earth is always warming or cooling, let’s applaud the Modern Warming, and hope that the next ice age is a long time coming.

Answer 3

How about the fact that this is not the first time the poles have melted? We have had North America covered in glaciers long before man and the combustion engine roamed the planet. The fossil record reminds us of the fact that this planet is capable of climactic change on a grand scale with no help at all from "man-kind". I need no data other the historical and fossil record I will let the Gores and Limbaugh's of the world bury us in the data. As to whether this slight warming trend will amount to significant change...time will tell.Be well.

Answer 4

I think you left off a more reasonable answer: F. Not exactly sure, but likely a large number of causes from surface albedos, atmospheric water vapor, etc.

Kind of a D, but more open-minded.

As for a study or "new light", check out the highly researched and presented information at http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Greenhouse_not_a_problem.htm.

Answer 5

Asia's largest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra, join in the world's most extensive delta and flow into the Bay of Bengal. There lies Bangladesh, a nation of 140 million people beset by poverty and the floods of the rivers, and now also affected by rising sea level. Gary Braasch visited to document this threat, and a report on Bangladesh facing global warming appears on the Oceans page

A global warming could spell the end of the world's largest remaining tropical rain forest, transforming the Amazon into a grassy savanna before end of the century, researchers said.

Jose Antonio Marengo, a meteorologist with Brazil's National Space Research Institute, said that global warming, if left unchecked, will reduce rainfall and raise temperatures substantially in the ecologically rich region.

"We are working with two scenarios: a worst case and a second, more optimistic one," he said yesterday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

"The worst case scenario sees temperatures rise by 5 to 8 degrees (Celsius) until 2100, while rainfall will decrease between 15 and 20 per cent. This setting will transform the Amazon rain forest into a savanna-like landscape," Marengo said.

That scenario supposes no major steps are taken toward halting global warming and that deforestation continues at its current rate, Marengo said.

The more optimistic scenario supposes Governments take more aggressive actions to halt global warming. It would still have temperatures rising in the Amazon region by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius and rainfall dropping by 5 to 15 per cent, Marengo said.

"If pollution is controlled and deforestation reduced, the temperature would rise by about 5 degrees Celsius in 2100," said Marengo. "Within this scenario, the rain forest will not come to the point of total collapse."


In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today -- more serious even than the threat of terrorism."

With this warning to an international science meeting in February 2004, David A. King, Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government, brought the issue of global warming into sharp focus.

The World View of Global Warming project is documenting this change through science photography from the Arctic to Antarctica, from glaciers to the oceans, across all climate zones. Rapid climate change and its effects is fast becoming one of the prime events of the 21st century. It is real and it is accelerating across the globe. As the effects of this change combine with overpopulation and weather crises, climate disruptions will affect more people than does war.

The 2005 average global temperature equaled (within several hundredths of a degree) the record warm year of 1998, according to meteorologists. 2002-4 were nearly as warm, and the 11 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1990. In response, our planet has been changing with warming winds and rising seas. At the poles and in mountains, ice is under fire and glaciers are receding. Down into the temperate zone, change is rearranging the boundaries of life. The plants and animals with whom we share the planet are adapting and moving -- some even going extinct -- because they have no choice.

We six billion humans are being affected, too. Coastal towns are suffering from rising sea level, storms are getting stronger and 35,000 people died in European heat waves in 2003. However, we have choices to make to help correct and ameliorate global warming. This is a story of frightening scale and and great urgency that is just beginning to be told. Please go to Actions to see what you can do now.

I began photographing climate change in 1999, about when scientists started to realize how great a change in temperatures is taking place in our time. Past earth temperatures left their mark in tree rings, glaciers and ancient lake and ocean sediments, and the record shows slowly decreasing temperatures over the last 2000 years. In that time there have been warm and cool periods, but nothing like the rise in temperatures in the past 150 years -- and no increase even close to the past 30. This research has created what has become the single most powerful icon of climate change, the so-called "hockey-stick" graph of temperatures. In 2005-6 it was subjected to intense re-analysis. Evidence of previous cool and warm periods has increased, but the rapid and sustained heat gain especially since the 1970s remains unparalleled in recent earth history.

Answer 6

The media is causing it! And scientists looking for grants.

To have a glacier it has to be cold, not warm. That's why it was called the Ice Age.