Global Warming - Are You Concerned?

Question

Do you lose sleep at night worrying or is it of little consequence to you?

Answer 1

To answer your question, I am very concerned. The relatively constant average temperatures of the last 10000 years (look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png ) has provided a stability that has allowed the human race to flourish. But, I live in northern California and I'm enjoying the relatively balmy weather here for a January, so I'm not losing any sleep.

I, too, am irritated with the folks claiming GW is a hoax and I do challenge them.The following is copied from http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/15656 :

Fact vs. Fiction on Climate Change
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We've just had the coldest day in June -- so much for global warming!


Fiction: Just look at X: it's the coldest day/month/year on record ... or: Region X has cooled by Y°F over the past two years! There is no global warming!


Fact: Statements like the one above are deliberate attempts by climate contrarians to confuse and mislead the public. It's an attempt to disprove the reality of global warming with a cold weather anomaly. This is not only scientific bogus, comparing apples and oranges, but outright dishonesty. Weather is the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, defined by variables such as temperature, moisture, wind, and barometric pressure. It is highly variable from day to day. By contrast, climate describes long-term weather patterns, with average temperatures and precipitation totals as well as typical occurrences of climatic extremes (such as normal dry periods or tropical storms) being used to characterize the climate for a particular region. This distinction is very important. Averages are always made up of numbers differing from the mean. Global warming is about the average going up. Over time this will make extreme colds become less likely.



Oh, what's a few degrees?


Fiction: A few degrees temperature increase won't matter much, and besides, warmer is better -- fewer cold-related deaths, longer growing seasons, lower heating bills. How many people actually notice the difference between 86 and 88.5°F?


Fact: Considering that in some regions people experience large daily temperature ranges (20-30°F), climate skeptics try to convince the public that global warming by a few degrees is nothing to worry about. This is another version of deliberately confusing weather and climate (see above). A small increase in the average temperature, however, obscures extremes and patterns of warming that are quite troubling: nighttime temperatures increase more than daily averages; there are already and will be more extreme heat but less extreme cold events; poleward latitudes warm more than other areas, etc. While the benefits of warming pointed out in the skeptics argument are certainly among the potential impacts of climate change, the potential negative impacts -- such as heat-related illnesses and deaths, increased heat stress for crops, greater energy needs for cooling etc. -- are strategically omitted. Moreover, it bears emphasis that the difference in global average temperature between the last ice age and the present day is about 9°F! This puts the IPCC's projected range of climate change-related global average temperature increases of 2.5-10.4°F in an entirely different light.



Human CO2 emissions are small compared to natural CO2 exchange.


Fiction: The 4.5% of the world's greenhouse gases that humans generate is insignificant when compared to the 95.5% generated by nature.


Fact: It is indeed true that human emissions of CO2 are a small percentage of the total carbon cycled through the different components of the Earth system: plants, soils, rocks, the oceans, and the air. But these human emissions are by no means insignificant. For the last 420,000 years, until the beginning of the industrial revolution (~1750), this cycle of carbon exchange was in a quasi-stable equilibrium, i.e., the continual release and uptake of carbon kept CO2 concentration in the Earth's atmosphere fluctuating between 180 ppm (parts per million) and 280 ppm. Since 1750, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has increased by 31%, to a present level of 367 ppm. This increase in the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels and large-scale deforestation and land-use change. These human activities have forced the carbon cycle out of the state of equilibrium and out of the known range of variation.



Satellite temperature records don't show any global warming.


Fiction: Satellite temperature records do not show a warming trend over the past 20 years, and ground-level data are incorrect and exaggerate the warming.


Fact: It is true that temperature records derived from satellites show either less warming than surface temperature data or even a cooling trend. Recent studies (most notably a study by the National Academy of Sciences published in 2000) found, however, that satellite data needed to be adjusted for some measurement and calibration problems. These adjustments bring surface and satellite records into better agreement, both showing a warming trend. It is important to note that many surface temperature records date back to 1860, while satellite records only date back to 1979. With such a short data record, observed trends can be strongly affected by extreme conditions -- such as the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo which decreased atmospheric temperatures for several years. In addition, satellite and surface data differ in what they record: surface thermometers measure the air temperature at the Earth's surface, while satellite data take temperatures of different slices of the atmosphere. Including records for the upper atmosphere -- where the depletion of the ozone layer has had a cooling effect -- will lower the overall temperature trends observed from satellites.



The observed warming is all due to solar variation, not human activities.


Fiction: An increase in solar irradiance is the main cause of the Earth's current warming trend. Therefore, reducing fossil fuel emissions would not impact the Earth's temperature.



Fact: Current scientific understanding leaves little doubt that the sun's radiant output impacts the Earth's climate on both decadal and centennial time scales. However, it is only one of many components affecting terrestrial climate. According to the findings of the Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change, the warming effect due to increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is estimated to be more than 8 times greater than the effect of solar irradiance.



What about the 19,000 scientists who claim we should not worry about global warming?


Fiction: There is no scientific consensus on climate change. Just look at the 19,000 scientists who signed on to the Global Warming Petition Project.


Fact: In the spring of 1998, mailboxes of US scientists flooded with packet from the "Global Warming Petition Project," including a reprint of a Wall Street Journal op-ed "Science has spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth," a copy of a faux scientific article claiming that "increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide have no deleterious effects upon global climate," a short letter signed by past-president National Academy of Sciences, Frederick Seitz, and a short petition calling for the rejection of the Kyoto Protocol on the grounds that a reduction in carbon dioxide "would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind."


The sponsor, little-known Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, tried to beguile unsuspecting scientists into believing that this packet had originated from the National Academy of the Sciences, both by referencing Seitz's past involvement with the NAS and with an article formatted to look as if it was a published article in the Academy's Proceedings, which it was not. The NAS quickly distanced itself from the petition project, issuing a statement saying, "the petition does not reflect the conclusions of expert reports of the Academy."


The petition project was a deliberate attempt to mislead scientists and to rally them in an attempt to undermine support for the Kyoto Protocol. The petition was not based on a review of the science of global climate change, nor were its signers experts in the field of climate science. In fact, the only criterion for signing the petition was a bachelor's degree in science. The petition resurfaced in early 2001 in an renewed attempt to undermine international climate treaty negotiations.

Answer 2

I don't lose any sleep at night worrying about it. This is because I don't live in areas where it is already negatively affecting my lifestyle.

If I was living in Alaska, I would be worrying, possibly losing sleep. In Fairbanks, highways are buckling and homes are sinking because the ground is no longer "permanently" frozen. Villagers in Shismaref are forced to move inland and give up their traditional fishing because rising sea levels and stronger storms have eroded the shoreline. Etc., Etc. And remember, this is Alaska not some state that gets freaky hot or cold weather from time to time due to El Nino. We expect Alaska to be cold and ground frozen.

I am irritated however with individuals falsely claiming that global warming is a hoax of some sort. They say this because hardly anyone lives in Alaska and other places that are already suffering. So nobody challenges their claims.

It is clear as day that these people can never be trusted. But that don't matter to them or anyone else. Nothing stops a liar from lying.

Answer 3

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 4

no
the weather records in the us only go back 130 years and the earth is millions of years old so how do we know that this has not happen be for . In the 1970s it was cold and snowed a lot
in 1979 Chicago got 88 inch of snow
in the 2000s not much snow in Chicago
if there is global warming then how does California get so cold

Answer 5

i could say that i'm careful. I even have observed that a results of present day financial problems some people are making judgements that are greater environmentally friendly as a thank you to shop money. i think of a great style of businesses are responding to this and springing up with green products as a thank you to stay correct. I even have observed some truly screwy climate the previous couple of years so I ought to assert that something is going on. whether we as people do no longer thoroughly comprehend it.

Answer 6

There is a little ice age here in California. Another freeze last night. We could use a little warming here in Central Ca.

Answer 7

W is not concern why should u. he backed out from the treaty when he first came to office in the Japan meeting. Dont know man, now Arizona is snowing and NY is 70 degree in Jan. should we really care?

Answer 8

Yes I am very worried.