Why is there no proof of Man made Global Warming?

Question

The Average worldwide temperature has risen over the last 50 years.

The average temperature has remained the same over the last 100 Years.

The average temperature has dropped over the last 20 years.

How can it be said the Earth is getting warmer with such inconclusive data?

Answer 1

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 2

Actually the average temperature of Earth has gone UP by 1 degree in the past 100 years. Of the 10 hottest avg. yearly temperatures, 8 have come in the last 15 years.

The fact that the earth is getting warmer is not in dispute, and nobody can credibly dispute the fact that human activity has led to the increase in greenhouse gasses over the past 100 years. These two facts are why the scientific community and the majority of the world accept that global warming is a man made phenomena.

I don't know where you got those numbers, but they are wrong.

As for absolute "proof"... That would be impossible, because it is impossible to do real life experiments on the entire planet.

EDIT:
The claim that there is some sort of recent cooling trend is completely false. Yes, 1998 was an unusually warm year - warmer than any year since -- but 2004 was the 4th warmest year in recorded history with an average global temperature of 14.6 degrees celcius. Compare that to the average global temperature in 1904 of 13.7 degrees celcius - and you've got a warming trend of more than one full degree fahrenheit over 100 years. Looking at the years since 1998 - while it was cooler in 1999, since then the trend was again upward (though I think 2003 was hotter than 2004, 2005 was actually hotter than 2004).

The reason it was cooler in 1999/2000 was because these were "la nina" years which are always cooler. After these years the trend was again towards warming.

Still not convinced that the earth is warming? Look at these graphs - they simply graphs of temperature records and are not biased towards any conclusion. Use your head - denial isn't going to accomplish anything.

Answer 3

The earth has a 13,000 year cycle where we go from hot periods to cold periods sometimes resulting in ice ages. Our planet as you know is tilted to give us the seasons as the planet moves about our sun. But our orbit is also is elongated and when our orbit and the tilt of the planet line up it can be extra cold or hot. We are now supposed to be in a cold period. The sun also has cycle where the sunspots decrease and the sun gets cooler this is a 13 year cycle but there are longer sun cycle where we get less heat for longer and longer periods of time. The sun is somewhat cooler than in the past. We have sufficient dust in the air that throughout the world the amount of sunlight hitting the ground has now decreased from 10% to 18%. This is measured by the evaporation rate that has been measured all over the world for the last hundred years. Where we measure the sunlight intensity. By all measurements we should be in a very cold period of time colder and wetter than has ever been recorded but it is hotter and dryer and storms are more intense than ever. We have released more carbon into the atmoshphere in the last 100 years that we released in all our previous history. We will release the same amount again over the next 10 years with the development of India and China. If you are still not convinced then you never will be. You are probably listening to those quasi scientist that recieve their funding from the Oil industry. All those fellows are not writing papers on the environement and they do not attend evironment seminars to hear what has been done. They prepare rediculous arguements of a polictical nature that only fool the uninfomed people.

Answer 4

There are two main problems:

1) We can't isolate and separately analyze the effect of different factors; and

2) We have no way to set up a control experiment.

Average worldwide temperatures have increased in recent decades; this much is not really in dispute. However in some areas the average temperature has actually gone down. What it all means, what's causing it, and so on are still largely indeterminate - no matter what AlGore the Soothsayer proclaimeth. What is known is that similar and sometimes greater temperature changes have taken place in the past, both within and before recorded history.

Answer 5

Because in science, we never prove things. We prove things in math. In science, we observe facts and make an hypothesis to explain the facts. The hypothesis can be DISPROVED by new contradictory facts. But more supporting facts cannot prove it.

Have you watched Gore's movie?? If you haven't, go watch it. If you have, then why aren't you convinced. I've been doing extensive research on this for quite a while and, as yet, have found nothing to dispute it. Plain and simple, the consensus in the scientific community is that it's mainly caused by emission of greenhouse gases due to human activities since the start if in industrial revolution. There is no disagreement in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The importance of peer-review cannot be overstated. That's what keeps science grounded and prevents "garbage-science" from confusing things. There's no such process in the popular press. As long as you stay away from libel, slander and inciting acts of terrorism, you're free to say whatever you want.

It's easy to understand how people can get confused about this when folks on Yahoo! Answers and, all over really, are hearing and repeating lies, half-truths and other statement whose only intention is to mislead and beguile.

Take, for example, Health-Nut_Ditto-Head's reply above. He copied an article from "The American Daily, Analysis with Political and Social Commentary" ( http://www.americandaily.com/article/13701 ) and presents it as his own work, without quotation marks or credit (BTW, this is called plagiarism). The American Daily is very conservative political commentary and opinion.

The article begins with the statement, "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. " This statement is totally unsubstantiated and flies in the face of every average global temperature graph I've seen for the last seven years!! The article also presents the viewpoint of Robert (Bob) Carter and Fred Singer as if this should be sufficient to offset the consensus of the entire worldwide scientific community. So I did five minutes of research on these guys and here's what I found:

Robert Carter writes articles for Tech Central Station, which received 63% of its income in 2003 from ExxonMobil. Tech Central Station (TCS) is the former name of TCS Daily. TCS was primarily funded by sponsors that currently or previously have included AT&T, The Coca-Cola Company, ExxonMobil, General Motors Corporation, McDonalds, Merck, Microsoft, Nasdaq, and PhRMA. TCSDaily was published by DCI Group, a lobbying and PR firm based in Washington, DC.

"Fred Singer ... is an atmospheric physicist. He is best known as President and founder (in 1990) of the Science & Environmental Policy Project, which disputes the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change. That is not all that he is skeptical about. "Singer is also skeptical about the connection between CFCs and ozone depletion, between ultraviolet radiation and skin cancer[2] [3] [4][5][6] and between second hand smoke and lung cancer[7][8][9]. " -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Singer I guess having a PhD after your name in no way precludes your being a total nutcase. Oops, maybe he isn't so nutty after all. In reply to accusations of conflict of interest, "In a February 2001 letter to the Washington Post, Singer denied receiving funding from the oil industry, except for consulting work some 20 years prior. While funds were not directed to Singer in his name, publicly available documents show that Singer's non-profit corporation SEPP received multiple grants from ExxonMobil, including in 1998 and 2000.[9]"

Just in case you aren't clear, consensus is not the same thing as unanimity. I can think of no better strategy for making sure that we never address global warming than that of waiting for every single scientist on the planet to agree, while meanwhile, CO2 continues to build up, the sea level continues to rise along with the average global temperature.

Puh-lease, Health-Nut_Ditto-Head. Give us a break and go find something of real significance to talk about!

Answer 6

If you look at the data, it is fact that humans are causing an unnatural amount of CO2 greenhouse gasses. This doesn't necessarily cause a "warming" as much as it causes and unnatural change. But it is fact that humans are causing an unnatural change.

Answer 7

come on how egotistical of us to think that we could have caused global warming... Volcanoes put out millions of times the carbon monoxide than do all the cars and factories.... we are nothing....Yes the temp is getting higher it has been doing that for millions of years...

Answer 8

if you want to know few facts from this theme watch film Inconvenient Truth from Al Gore!

Scientist write facts and people from the government rewrite this facts so it is not so bad for people to hear.
That is why there is no proof!

And another thing...
Tell me why is good to think we didn't do nothing wrong, when we CAN do our best to reduce pollution!!!!!

Answer 9

because he didn;t get a receipt.