Is anybody else skeptical about this whole malarkey about global warming?

Question

If you read the news today you can here the same Bologna being piped that man is the major cause of global warming. Doesn't anybody else ever question the audacity of these so called scientific "experts?" Yes maybe man is partially to blame, but was man around when the glaciers started disappearing? What makes us think that the glaciers ever stopped disappearing in the first place? Here are the links to the outlandish rhetoric that the sky is falling and the evidence against it. Sure we need to take care of our earth, but we unfortunately have less control of the earth than we like to believe.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070202/ap_on_sc/france_climate_change;_ylt=AtfFDBtmTI3E04zWWThnxGGs0NUE;_ylu=X3oDMTA2Z2szazkxBHNlYwN0bQ--
http://fathersforlife.org/REA/warming4.htm

2 questions for all you sheep to consider.

How many ice ages has the earth experienced?
Who caused the warming in the last cycles?

As for the whole scientific community, how long did "Scientistis" believe that the world was flat? How long did "Scientists" believe that the sound barrier could not be crossed? How long did "Scientistis" believe that what goes up must come down?

So for all of you unable to think for yourselves, you can't prove it to me.

I do believe the earth is warming. I do not believe we are completely responsible.

Inspite of all this, I am very saddened that we poisoned our seas, the air and killed off much of what was good on this planet.

In response to Keith P. your own sources refute your argument. I'll just quote them.

"While these results indicate that direct solar total irradiance forcing is unlikely to be the cause of global warming in the past decade, the acquisition of a much longer composite solar irradiance record is essential for reliably spceifying the role of the Sun in global climate change."

As this is the basis of your whole argument, I would say your scientists have let you down.

previos addition was taken from
http://ieg.or.kr:8080/abstractII/G0102523037.PDF

Just one note, scientists are not infallible or necessarily purely motivated. Take Dr. Hwang in South Korea-- a "Scientist" who had the whole world believing his fabricated myths about his accomplishments in genetics.

If he was capable of fooling “smart" scientists for so long, what makes any of you think that this could be any different?

We need to take care of the environment. We should stop polluting. We should find better means of disposing waist, but just because we should stop polluting does not me we will stop global warming.

I am afraid that global warming is inevitable. We are faced with a dilemma that I am afraid can only be solved by Christ coming back or interstellar travel for the day that the earth becomes inhabitable.

Answer 1

Ice ages (and inter-glacial periods) are caused by "orbital forcing", changes in Earth's orbit that cause extended periods of longer or shorter winters in the Northern hemisphere. Since Earth's orbit can be computed for centuries into the past and future, orbital forcing can be computed and predicted with decent accuracy. Orbital forcing indicates that in the current interglacial era, Earth's temperature peaked 6000 years ago, and should be slowly cooling since then. (Here's a reference) http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/207/4434/943

In other words, the natural cycle that causes ice ages has already peaked, and should be taking us in the cooler direction. Meanwhile the earth's temperature is rising rapidly: all ten of the ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1994. So clearly something other than natural orbital forcing is at work.

Could solar activity be the culprit? Possible, but not likely. There is no convincing evidence that solar activity has been increasing during the past couple of cycles. Here's another reference. http://ieg.or.kr:8080/abstractII/G0102523037.PDF

Meanwhile, the level of CO2 in the air now is higher than at any time in the last 23 million years, and the growth in CO2 shows no sign of slowing down. (Here's a graph).
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig3-2.htm

Regarding disappearing glaciers, we have historical records on glacier size going back centuries in some cases. The retreat of glaciers accelerated rapidly with the industrial revolution. Here's another graph:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/fig2-18.htm

You also might want to read the largest peer-reviewed study in the history of science:
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/
.

Reply to additional information:
You will find similar disclaimers and desires for more data in nearly every scientific paper ever published. Scientists are on the whole a conservative lot, and are very careful to avoid claiming more than the data indicate. That's one reason the latest IPCC report (which states that it is "very likely" that global warming is caused by humans) should be a big wake-up call. Scientists almost never use language that strong, and when they do, you'd better pay attention.

Answer 2

I live in the mountains of Virginia and got a phone call this morning from my boss saying he would rather take the day off work because it is so cold, and asking me if I minded staying home instead of working. My boss is a tough man. We are carpenters. I told him I'll see him when it warms up a little. Where's Al Gore's global warming when we need it? What scares me is that so many people are ignorant enough to believe Al Gore's lies. I remember the global cooling scare of the 1970s when environazis said pollution was causing global cooling and we would all freeze. Then the earth naturally warmed a little and those same people started screaming about global warming. When I was a kid we had a special word for global warming. We called it summer. I hope it comes soon...

Answer 3

Man, you have some deeply flawed logic in your question.

1) They are not claiming total responsibility for the warming, they are saying there is a distinct human-caused component to it. So your aruments about past warming/cooling are irrelevant to the situation at hand.

2) You also seem to indicate that we shouldn't believe humans can influence the atmosphere based on the fact that the world was once believed to be flat, and other historical oddities. What happened hundreds of years ago has no bearing on what happens today. It is not like the same person who said the world is flat is now saying the world is warming. Furthermore, the "world is flat" crowd were not scientists, as you state. They were the ignorant crowd. Anyone from the ancient Egyptians to the Mayas, who actually studied these things, concluded the world was round. Copernicus was attacked by religous nuts for saying the earth is not the center of the universe. So you've confused what the popular beliefs were in the past with what scientists were actually saying at the time.

3) You refer to the scientists as "so called scientific 'experts'". These people all have Ph.Ds is atmospheric science or related fields. So yes, they are "experts". They represent the most enlightened humans on earth within their subject. You trying to dissmiss their claims by offering counter-evidence produced by people who are not even in the same league shows poor judgement on your part. It reminds me of an article I found on traditionalvalues.org, where they tried to discredit global warming by quoting a politician, an author with no background on the subject, and television weathermen.

Answer 4

The problem is that it's not a few scientific experts. It's basically the whole scientific community. 2500 scientists from all over the world worked on the report. Their governments had to approve their work. They surely didn't want to look bad to their fellow scientists who didn't work on it. This is as solid as science ever gets.

Which is why business leaders and conservative politicians, many of who denied global warming in the past, have come to accept it as real.

Some have been outlandish in making claims of imminent Hollywood style disaster. But that's not what the IPCC report is all about. It is a sober and actually conservative analysis by serious and qualified professionals. The science behind it is why these people are convinced:

"The science of global warming is clear. We know enough to act now. We must act now."

James Rogers, CEO of Charlotte-based Duke Energy.

"The overwhelming majority of atmospheric scientists around the world and our own National Academy of Sciences are in essential agreement on the facts of global warming and the significant contribution of human activity to that trend."

Russell E. Train, former environmental official under Presidents Nixon and Ford

"Our nation has both an obligation and self-interest in facing head-on the serious environmental, economic and national security threat posed by global warming."

John McCain, Republican, Senator, Arizona

"These technologies will help us become better stewards of the environment - and they will help us to confront the serious challenge of global climate change."

President George Bush

Answer 5

I don't buy it for a minute. Sadly the 'scientific experts' have abandoned science completely. You learned in high school (or earlier) that in science, you thought up a theory, ran experiments to prove or disprove it, then accepted the conclusions of those experiments. The experiments, however, had to be repeatable! It's a joke to call the 'science' of global warming scientific experimentation.

In this new 'science', conclusions are based on concensus, rather than facts. A large group of scientists (smart people, all of them) get together and put together perfectly plausible scenarios of global warming. These scenarios are in no way provable by actual science, but because the scientists all agree that things sound OK, this concensus is passed to the public as 'expert scientific testimony'. Sadly, none of these theories even come close to standing up to the scientific bedrock of true experimentation. Remember, at one point, the scientific concensus was the the Earth was flat.

My opinion is that this is all largely political science, not actual science. Throughout much of history, there have been more dictatorships and socialist governments than free ones. I don't know what it is, but something breeds in man, a desire for socialism. Capitalism is the opposite of socialism and the basis for American freedom. Many 'global warming' policies would severly hurt businesses, thus curtailing capitalism and making a stronger case for socialism (from each according to his means, to each according to his need). It's very scary, this push that's being made in the name of global warming.

Remember when eggs were bad for you, then they were good for you, then bad again...etc. Butter was bad for you, then good, then margarine was the only thing you were supposed to eat to stay healthy? "They" used to just suggest that you cut those habits. Good thing too, since much preliminary science turned out to be wrong. Now, as soon as a study is funded that says 'trans fats are bad', boom! NYC outlaws them. Smoking, light bulbs. Creating laws against this stuff is happing and its scary. The push against so called global warming is the scariest of them all.

Answer 6

You need to forget about whether there is really global warming.

The question should be "Are the pollutants we are putting in the air good for us or bad for us?" "Are there better fuels and better, cleaner ways to harness energy?" "Should our government increase the funding for research and development of solar power, hydrogen power, wind power, etc.?'
The answer to all of these questions is YES.

We need to know the results of our current excesses, but the focus should be on the future, and the government is the only entity that has the resources to pull this together. Unfortunately, there focus is elsewhere.

Answer 7

Millions of tons of crap DAILY into the atmosphere is nothing to sneeze at. Pun intended.

We are screwing ourselves over for a buck.
Shooting ourselves in the herd.
Stepping on our own ducks.
Cutting off our nose to spite our finch.
Kicking ourselves in the aardvark.

We're ruining it for everybody and everything, and people who can't accept it are three fries short of a Happy Meal.

Answer 8

You contradicted yourself when you said yeah maybe man is partly to blame. So you are not 100% sure it is not happening.
And yes man was around when the glaciers started disappearing.

Answer 9

You're not really a credible expert, and neither is "fathersforlife.org." I don't think I'm actually going to answer this question because it's a pretty ignorant one. You don't have to be an expert to realize what's going on.

Answer 10

I sense a repulican political backing here. Go put your head back in the sand and stop bothering people who care.