Why are there those who still think Global Warming is just some made up thing?

Question

ok of course i know that our things are transported by trucks and things that use fossil fuels. While there were times of climate change before, why is it that this time it is happening in a rate that is unlike all the past climatic events before? If we don't believe in it, shouldn't we at least realize that there isnt an infinite supply of fossil fuels, and that our govts should be doing more to make alternative sources before our govts go to war over oil

While there were climatic changes before, we should realize that what we are doing is making it accelarate faster than it naturally would. for some of you who are in your 30's and 40's who read this and dont think humans contribute to global warming, how would you feel if you found out you were wrong and that global warming was a serious threat to your children. dont you think its better for the govts of the world to slow down economic growth now to save the environment instead of spending more to repair it in the future? I hate how the older generations have left us with such a polluted world

Answer 1

A large portion of it is a small minority of scientist that are instilling doubt in the public mind about the validity of the science behind the climate change. There is alot of money and politics bound up with the issue which tends to blur things.

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/30/congress.climate.ap/index.html

Despite the fact that an international collective of unbiased scientists concluded that there was a 90% chance of the climate change being man caused people do not want to accept that their lifestyle is destroying the only earth we have.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/01/21/news/climate.php

Answer 2

We don't think it is made up. We have questions you sheep would never ask. How much of global warming is cause by fossil fuels? How much of it is caused by the earths tilt and orbit?
How much is cause by sun spots or solar energy? There have been six Ice ages and many mini ice ages followed by global warming. Most of these occurred without men. Unless you can nail down all the answers to the above questions how do you know what effect we can have on global warming. I do believe we should do everything possible to protect the world we live in but answer this question and you will see how tough it will be. Tell me one thing you have purchased in the last year that didn't require fossil fuels? From getting the materials and workers to the factories to the trucks,trains and or ships it took to get to a distribution center and then to the store....Oh and then you had to drive to the store to buy it. Do you have any questions? You should. Interesting articles below

Answer 3

Because it is.

5 reasons why the hypothesis that humans cause (or contribute significantly to) Global Warming is bunk:

1) We can't predict weather for next Thursday - how are we supposed to believe climate models looking out decades?

2) Mars is also experiencing Global Warming. Why?

3) There are about 20 serious climate models in use today. They don't agree with each other.

4) The climate models are "specutacularly poor"(*) at predicting the past. That is, we should be able to feed in data from (say) 1982 and predict 1983. The results compare poorly to the observed data for 1983. Why should they be any better for 2008?

5) Little attention is given to the gas that is far-and-away the #1 contributor to global warming: Water vapor.
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

(*) In the words of Dr. S. Fred Singer. He is an atmospheric physicist at George Mason University and founder of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, a think tank on climate and environmental issues. The quoted phrase is from an interview: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/warming/debate/singer.html

Answer 4

Most people do not think it is some made up thing. There is a difference between believing it is made up and believing humans have a substantial effect.Scientists have proved that the Earth is warming up. However, they have not shown what percentage humans affect the Earth. A volcano eruption emits the same amount of CO2 that every single car driving for five years does, and volcanoes have been erupting a lot longer than cars and factories have been around.

Answer 5

I wonder why those that think it ALL MANS FAULT constantly cast apersions on the motives of those that don't? They never try to refute any evidence presented to them that might upset their applecarts.

The scientific literature (not CNN or the IHT) are full of articles about alternative causes of global warming and their relative impact compared to man made causes.

Environ Geol (2006) 50: 899–910
Pure appl. geophys. 162 (2005) 1557–1586
Meteorol Atmos Phys 95, 115–121 (2007)

Do some real checking, the newspapers are written by journalists, not scientists.

Answer 6

Some of us are old enough and wise enough to know a fake when we see it. Mustafa needs to go back to grade school if he can't figure out the logic of why Mars and Earth both having global warming is evidence against human caused global warming. He also typifies the alarmists who refuse to address the affects of water vapor since it can't be pinned on humans. Talk about an inconvenient truth.

Answer 7

I think everybody has accepted global warming.

Whether or not man-made global warming exists, that's another debate. Scientific evidence indicates that global warming occurs naturally, while political evidence indicates that global warming is caused by man, and can therefore be used for personal and financial gain.

Answer 8

they have been duped by the gov't and the many orgs paid by big oil & gas to confuse them. plus, to admit we are causing a large percentage of the problem means certain lifestyle changes that many people don't want. they are too comfortable. i think that everything will just have to be done for them (i.e. sustainable power sources, cleaner and more efficient vehicles, better farming practices, less red meat in the diet, industry pollution controls, packaging made from biodegradable materials)...mr. and mrs. average consumer is not to be relied upon to make intelligent and sustainable choices: like sheep, they just need to be provided for, they don't care what keeps the wolf at bay while they graze in the sun, they just know that there are no wolves around, you know? we need to increase our education of the subject in the school system, as well as shift our model to a paradigm that places man WITHIN the environment as opposed to separate from it. many of these people don't understand that we are symbiants, they take it for granted. they assume that food will be available to buy at the grocery (and if there is none they will likely starve). all these issues are interrelated...

Answer 9

Some refuse to accept reality. That's ok. It is rather childlike precocious attitude. Some people believe that there are 12 planets orbiting the sun, some do not. That is ok also.
Cars they make today will be sold and taxes will be paid on the gas used. Eco Friendly cars use Coal Fired Power Plants, that is one step forward, 8 steps back.
I stopped trying to make any sense of it and do my best to look busy.
Have a great day!

Answer 10

Plus Ça (Climate) Change
The Earth was warming before global warming was cool.

BY PETE DU PONT
Wednesday, February 21, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST (Wall Street Journal Online)

When Eric the Red led the Norwegian Vikings to Greenland in the late 900s, it was an ice-free farm country--grass for sheep and cattle, open water for fishing, a livable climate--so good a colony that by 1100 there were 3,000 people living there. Then came the Ice Age. By 1400, average temperatures had declined by 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, the glaciers had crushed southward across the farmlands and harbors, and the Vikings did not survive.

Such global temperature fluctuations are not surprising, for looking back in history we see a regular pattern of warming and cooling. From 200 B.C. to A.D. 600 saw the Roman Warming period; from 600 to 900, the cold period of the Dark Ages; from 900 to 1300 was the Medieval warming period; and 1300 to 1850, the Little Ice Age.

During the 20th century the earth did indeed warm--by 1 degree Fahrenheit. But a look at the data shows that within the century temperatures varied with time: from 1900 to 1910 the world cooled; from 1910 to 1940 it warmed; from 1940 to the late 1970s it cooled again, and since then it has been warming. Today our climate is 1/20th of a degree Fahrenheit warmer than it was in 2001.




Many things are contributing to such global temperature changes. Solar radiation is one. Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that "the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming."
Statistics suggest that while there has indeed been a slight warming in the past century, much of it was neither human-induced nor geographically uniform. Half of the past century's warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now. And while global temperatures are now slightly up, in some areas they are dramatically down. According to "Climate Change and Its Impacts," a study published last spring by the National Center for Policy Analysis, the ice mass in Greenland has grown, and "average summer temperatures at the summit of the Greenland ice sheet have decreased 4 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the late 1980s." British environmental analyst Lord Christopher Monckton says that from 1993 through 2003 the Greenland ice sheet "grew an average extra thickness of 2 inches a year," and that in the past 30 years the mass of the Antarctic ice sheet has grown as well.




Earlier this month the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth five-year report. Although the full report won't be out until May, the summary has reinvigorated the global warming discussion.
While global warming alarmism has become a daily American press feature, the IPCC, in its new report, is backtracking on its warming predictions. While Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" warns of up to 20 feet of sea-level increase, the IPCC has halved its estimate of the rise in sea level by the end of this century, to 17 inches from 36. It has reduced its estimate of the impact of global greenhouse-gas emissions on global climate by more than one-third, because, it says, pollutant particles reflect sunlight back into space and this has a cooling effect.

The IPCC confirms its 2001 conclusion that global warming will have little effect on the number of typhoons or hurricanes the world will experience, but it does not note that there has been a steady decrease in the number of global hurricane days since 1970--from 600 to 400 days, according to Georgia Tech atmospheric scientist Peter Webster.

The IPCC does not explain why from 1940 to 1975, while carbon dioxide emissions were rising, global temperatures were falling, nor does it admit that its 2001 "hockey stick" graph showing a dramatic temperature increase beginning in 1970s had omitted the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming temperature changes, apparently in order to make the new global warming increases appear more dramatic.




Sometimes the consequences of bad science can be serious. In a 2000 issue of Nature Medicine magazine, four international scientists observed that "in less than two decades, spraying of houses with DDT reduced Sri Lanka's malaria burden from 2.8 million cases and 7,000 deaths [in 1948] to 17 cases and no deaths" in 1963. Then came Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," invigorating environmentalism and leading to outright bans of DDT in some countries. When Sri Lanka ended the use of DDT in 1968, instead of 17 malaria cases it had 480,000.
Yet the Sierra Club in 1971 demanded "a ban, not just a curb," on the use of DDT "even in the tropical countries where DDT has kept malaria under control." International environmental controls were more important than the lives of human beings. For more than three decades this view prevailed, until the restrictions were finally lifted last September.

As we have seen since the beginning of time, and from the Vikings' experience in Greenland, our world experiences cyclical climate changes. America needs to understand clearly what is happening and why before we sign onto U.N. environmental agreements, shut down our industries and power plants, and limit our economic growth.

Mr. du Pont, a former governor of Delaware, is chairman of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis. His column appears once a month.