The greenhouse effect?

Question

i kno what it is, but are their any real problems with it?are we really gunna all die if we don't do something?Or is it just some political scam?

Answer 1

Well, whenever my dad was in school, they were talking about the freezing over of the earth. I think that is not rather a political scam...but whenever someone just gets the slightest hint of something, they blow it out of proportion. I see that, yes our gases and other things we do ARE contributing to the level of stuff (for lack of a better term) in the atmosphere/ ozone layer, but we are not in danger of DYING. We might need to eventually look into protecting our wonderful atomosphere and stop some of the things we are excessively doing. The real problems are that people are worrying others that we are all going to die and blah blah blah..but in reality they will be saying something else in the next couple of years. hint: not that weathermen are bad, but they are a lot of times VERY wrong in their answers..noone can really predict what will happen to us, but I think that everything is just really blown out of proportion.

Answer 2

I'm assuming from the way you framed this question your very young, so ill give you the benefit of the doubt and not be so mean answering this question. The environment you live in is your home, whatever the opposition says; (you need to ask yourself, why would they want to pollute my home and then tell me its all a political scam if you think pollution is bad?) You need to only understand a few things, 1. Every Acton has a reaction 2. That it is not so much what the individual does but the whole (there are 6.5 billion of us all wanting to get somewhere, and be either hot or cold.) 3. don't look at it as just global warming but rather global climate change, It is climate change we need to be ready for, be it a freeze in the summer time or 80+ degrees in winter. Because what we are doing is burning 400 million year old stored carbon, before this carbon was locked up the world had less oxygen and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a totally different world then the one we evolved in during the last 2 million years.

Answer 3

The greenhouse effect is one of the main contributors to global warming which in turn is one of the main contributors to climate change.

We're already seeing the effects of climate change. Some parts of the ice caps are melting causing sea levels to rise (the Arctic ice cap is floating so even if it all melted sea levels wouldn't be affected - it's the melting of the Antarctic ice cap that's the problem). Sea levels have risen 8 inches in the last century and are set to rise by several feet in the next century. No one can accurately say by how many feet but even a small rise will have serious consequences for low lying communities. A few weeks ago the world witnessed the first climate refugees who were forced to abandon their Pacific island homes as rising sea levels were engulfing them.

There's a million square kilometres of Siberia that's melting. For millenia it's been permafrost but now it's mud and lakes. This is one of the advantages of global warming as it's produced new agricultural land. On the other hand the deserts are expanding, not just due to the shifting sands but in the total area of the earths surface that is desert. This desertification is forcing people out of their homes and lands and once fertile land is now barren wasteland.

The world is warming faster now than it's done at any time in known history. It's not the warmest it's ever been; it was warmer than it is now some 140,000 years ago. However, if current trends continue then in a few decades the world will be the warmest it's even been and a lot of this is down to human activity.

The planet goes through it's own wraming and cooling cycles but what's worrying the scientists is the speed at which the world is currently warming up. In the last 20 or so years the world has wrmed up by the same amount it would in 630 years of natural warming - in other words, it's warming 30 times quicker than it should be doing.

We're not all going to die (not for a long time anyway) but it will mean major changes for many people. What we've already seen and will continue to see in future is a general rise in temperatures. In the US 5 of the last 7 years have been the warmest on record, in Europe 11 of the last 12 have been the warmest on record. The odds of this happening by chance are several octillion to one against.

Scientists have been aware of global warming long before it became a political issue, Unfortunately, there are many politicians who have jumped on the global warming bandwagon for their own political gains. Understandably this has led many people to believe global warming is a scam being used by politicians. But... the fact is that scientists were there way before the politicians. It woukd probably be of great benefit to everyone of the politicians butted out and let those who know what they're talking about get on with it.

Answer 4

the greenhouse efeect is caused due to the various greenhouse gases like CO2 , NO2 etc. they form a layer around the earth n then let the heat radiations from sun enter the earth but dont let it escape out from the earth as terrestrial radiation. Yes it will be harmful to us in next few years if no prevention steps are taken.
Hope that fits ur answer!!

Answer 5

the greenhouse effect traps CO2 on earth and warms the earth. Earth would not be able to house us without the greenhouse effect.

CO2 is released from a lot of human activities, so the greenhouse effects will continue to trap CO2 on earth, gradually warming it. This causes global warming.

Answer 6

It has nothing to do with politics. It's a natural reoccurring fact. Granted out putting this BS in the air might be bringing it on faster but there's no way to stop it. They might lead you to believe that it's all political BS but that's just another BS ploy.

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

yes?
no.
no.
yes.

Top 10 'Global-Warming' Myths


Compiled by Christopher Horner, author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism" (Regnery -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company).

10. The U.S. is going it alone on Kyoto and global warming.

Nonsense. The U.S. rejects the Kyoto Protocol’s energy-rationing scheme, along with 155 other countries, representing most of the world’s population, economic activity and projected future growth. Kyoto is a European treaty with one dozen others, none of whom is in fact presently reducing its emissions. Similarly, claims that Bush refused to sign Kyoto, and/or he withdrew, not only are mutually exclusive but also false. We signed it, Nov. 11, 1998. The Senate won’t vote on it. Ergo, the (Democratic) Senate is blocking Kyoto. Gosh.

Don’t demand they behave otherwise, however. Since Kyoto was agreed, Europe’s CO2 emissions are rising twice as fast as those of the climate-criminal United States, a gap that is widening in more recent years. So we should jump on a sinking ship?

Given Al Gore’s proclivity for invoking Winston Churchill in this drama, it is only appropriate to summarize his claims as such: Never in the field of political conflict has so much been asked by so few of so many ... for so little.

9. Global-warming proposals are about the environment.

Only if this means that they would make things worse, given that “wealthier is healthier and cleaner.” Even accepting every underlying economic and alarmist environmentalist assumption, no one dares say that the expensive Kyoto Protocol would detectably affect climate. Imagine how expensive a pact must be -- in both financial and human costs -- to so severely ration energy use as the greens demand. Instead, proponents candidly admit desires to control others’ lifestyles, and supportive industries all hope to make millions off the deal. Europe’s former environment commissioner admitted that Kyoto is “about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide” (in other words, bailing them out).

8. Climate change is the greatest threat to the world's poor.

Climate -- or more accurately, weather -- remains one of the greatest challenges facing the poor. Climate change adds nothing to that calculus, however. Climate and weather patterns have always changed, as they always will. Man has always best dealt with this through wealth creation and technological advance -- a.k.a. adaptation -- and most poorly through superstitious casting of blame, such as burning “witches.” The wealthiest societies have always adapted best. One would prefer to face a similar storm in Florida than Bangladesh. Institutions, infrastructure and affordable energy are key to dealing with an ever-changing climate, not rationing energy.

7. Global warming means more frequent, more severe storms.

Here again the alarmists cannot even turn to the wildly distorted and politicized “Summary for Policy Makers” of the UN’s IPCC to support this favorite chestnut of the press.

6. Global warming has doomed the polar bears!

For some reason, Al Gore’s computerized polar bear can’t swim, unlike the real kind, as one might expect of an animal named Ursa Maritimus. On the whole, these bears are thriving, if a little less well in those areas of the Arctic that are cooling (yes, cooling). Their biggest threat seems to be computer models that air-brush them from the future, the same models that tell us it is much warmer now than it is. As usual in this context, you must answer the question: Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?

5. Climate change is raising the sea levels.

Sea levels rise during interglacial periods such as that in which we (happily) find ourselves. Even the distorted United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports refute the hysteria, finding no statistically significant change in the rate of increase over the past century of man’s greatest influence, despite green claims of massive melting already occurring. Small island nations seeking welfare and asylum for their citizens such as in socially generous New Zealand and Australia have no sea-level rise at all and in some cases see instead a drop. These societies’ real problem is typically that they have made a mess of their own situation. One archipelago nation is even spending lavishly to lobby the European Union for development money to build beachfront hotel resorts, at the same time it shrieks about a watery and imminent grave. So, which time are they lying?

4. The glaciers are melting!

As good fortune has it, frozen things do in fact melt or at least recede after cooling periods mercifully end. The glacial retreat we read about is selective, however. Glaciers are also advancing all over, including lonely glaciers nearby their more popular retreating neighbors. If retreating glaciers were proof of global warming, then advancing glaciers are evidence of global cooling. They cannot both be true, and in fact, neither is. Also, retreat often seems to be unrelated to warming. For example, the snow cap on Mount Kilimanjaro is receding -- despite decades of cooling in Kenya -- due to regional land use and atmospheric moisture.

3. Climate was stable until man came along.

Swallowing this whopper requires burning every basic history and science text, just as “witches” were burned in retaliation for changing climates in ages (we had thought) long past. The “hockey stick” chart -- poster child for this concept -- has been disgraced and airbrushed from the UN’s alarmist repertoire.

2. The science is settled -- CO2 causes global warming.

Al Gore shows his audience a slide of CO2 concentrations, and a slide of historical temperatures. But for very good reason he does not combine them in one overlaid slide: Historically, atmospheric CO2, as often as not, increases after warming. This is typical in the campaign of claiming “consensus” to avoid debate (consensus about what being left unspoken or distorted).

What scientists do agree on is little and says nothing about man-made global warming, to wit: (1) that global average temperature is probably about 0.6 degree Celsius -- or 1 degree Fahrenheit -- higher than a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen by about 30% over the past 200 years; and (3) that CO2 is one greenhouse gas, some level of an increase of which presumably would warm the Earth’s atmosphere were all else equal, which it demonstrably is not.

Until scientists are willing to save the U.S. taxpayer more than $5 billion per year thrown at researching climate, it is fair to presume the science is not settled.

1. It’s hot in here!

In fact, “It’s the baseline, stupid.” Claiming that present temperatures are warm requires a starting point at, say, the 1970s, or around the Little Ice Age (approximately 1200 A.D to the end of the 19th Century), or thousands of years ago. Select many other baselines, for example, compared o the 1930s, or 1000 A.D. -- or 1998 -- and it is presently cool. Cooling does paint a far more frightening picture, given that another ice age would be truly catastrophic, while throughout history, warming periods have always ushered in prosperity. Maybe that’s why the greens tried “global cooling” first.

The claim that the 1990s were the hottest decade on record specifically targets the intellectually lazy and easily frightened, ignoring numerous obvious factors. “On record” obviously means a very short period, typically the past 100+ years, or since the end of the Little Ice Age. The National Academies of Science debunked this claim in 2006. Previously rural measuring stations register warmer temps after decades of “sprawl” (growth), cement being warmer than a pasture.