How can anyone say global warming is a hoax or not real?

Question

the evidence that it is real is all around us. seasons are starting late or early. hurricanes are getting more powerful. the polar ice caps are melting. in Washington D.C we reached the high 70's in October. OCTOBER!!! of the 25 hottest years on record the last 21 are on the list. how can anyone say global warming is not real with all the evidence that proves other wise?

Answer 1

You are so right.here in Seattle we have insects that come out in may or June have already been out foe almost 2 months alredy.the wood ants the caterpillars are out and the other day i seen a raccoon in our yard at 10.oo in the morning,i have never seen one in the daytime..last summer was one of the hotest we have had for over 100 years' and it;s only gonna get much worse...and the prez said there's no such thing as global warming,,,,he;s not to smart as we know anyway,,,,,i feel for all the animals like the polar bears that are drowning because the ice is warming and melting so fast,,,What makes me angry to is al gore trying to explain what 100 scientists are saying of the warming and people especially in wash d,c,are saying he;s crazy and don;t know what he;s talking about' but he does 'and the scientists do also,,,,were going to disappear like the dinosaurs did!!!!!!!!good luck always,.,.

Answer 2

Because you are not looking at all the evidence.

You are looking at a few random bits of data, here and there, and trying to use them to support a conclusion that they do not support. That's not science.

What you are doing is like picking up 3 pieces out of a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle and saying "It must all be blue". Well maybe it is all blue and you are right... or maybe you just grabbed 3 blue pieces. It could be that the puzzle is a picture of of a waterfall, or a ship, or a field of flowers, or of a group of hot air ballons, and you grabbed three pieces that make up the sky. Either way, you don't have enough data to support your conclusion. What you are doing is unscientific argument, no logic is involved. It is sophistry.

Did you know, for example, that fossls from Antartica show that during the Cretacious period there were forests only 200 or so miles from the South Pole, and that they were filled with ferns, plants, mammals, and dinosaurs? The Earth would have to be a heck of a lot warmer than it is right now for that to be happening, and since it was almost 100,000,000 years ago even Al Gore can't be blaiming that on George W. Bush or cars or Dow Chemical.

So your question is far to symplistic. Looked at logically it would be something more like this.

A) Is the Earth growing warmer?
The data on this is mixed, (back in the 1970s the political left was screaming about "GLOBAL COOLING" and the coming Ice Ages) but it could well be growing warmer.

The problem is these climate cycles run over not single years, but hundreds or even thousands... just because things have been warmer or cooler in the past couple of years doesn't mean anything, statistics can be like that. You get freak events in statistics. Every so often someone hits it big in Vegas and goes home with a million dollars in their pocket, but you don't see the Casinos loosing money and closing up shop do you? 2004 was an active hurricane season, 2005 had a very difficult hurricane season, but the trend didn't continue and 2006 was quiet.

B) If so, is this climate change anything out of the ordinary?
Probably not. The late Middle Ages were much warmer than things are now, (Lief Ericson found wild grapes growing in Newfoundland) but the late Tudor Period was a lot cooler than it is now. There have been several climate changes that in Earth's history that have been much more severe than even Al Gore's worst case scenarios. (See the dinosaurs at the South Pole I talked about above.) During the Ice Age things were a whole lot colder than they are right now. Remember when you are talking about Climate "short term" can mean "several thousand years" and "long term" means "tens of millions of years."

C) Could this change be man made or is it simply a natural cycle?

This we DO NOT have any consclusive data on. As I said above climate shifts without any human interference at all. On the other hand we have pumped quite a bit of C02 into the air over the past 200 years. There might be something there, there might not be.

D) If this is true, is it a bad thing?
This is often ignored. Al Gore and is merry band of fools love to scare people with global warming. On the other hand the data from the times in the past when the Earth was warmer indicate that it may not be that bad a thing. The Late Mideval warm period saw in increase in European farm fertiltity and a consequental increase in wealth. Making northern Canada warmer would move the tree line north, turning a lot of empty usless tundra into forest, or perhaps even farmland. The same for Siberia. It could mean longer growing seasons in the Midwest, with increased crop yields and greater food prodction.. which would be a pretty big deal if you are a starving African pesant.

E) If it is manmade, can we do anything about it?
This is a serious question. If the situation is so grave that the entire planetary climate is involved, well you and me and Suzy taking the bus to work isn't going to have enough of an impact to change anything. Heck the entire North American Continent taking the bus to work wouldn't change anything...Earth is to darn big for that. Seriously. You could ban every car in the USA tomorrow and it wouldn't significantly effect the Earth's carbon ballance.

On the other hand, if the situation is small enough that you and me and Suzy all driving hybrids WILL have an impact...well then it is small enough that it does not require the Government restricting our right as free citizens to drive where, when and how we want, to buy what we want, or to sell or make what we want.

So we simply do not have enough data to say that "Global Warming" is taking place; assuming that it is taking place we don't know if it is manmade, assuming that it is manmade we don't know that it would necessairly be bad, and most of all, we DO NOT have any data on if we could actually do anything about,... One of the reasons the Senate refused to ratify the Koyoto treaty was that it would have cost trillions of dollars to perhaps prevent a few degrees of warming for a period of a few years. That makes no economic sense.

We do however know that questions like yours show a distinct lack of scientific education and a deep unfamiliarity with logic, climate science, or economics.

We also can recognize political grandstanding and demigogery we we see it.

So that is how people can say Global Warming is a hoax.

Answer 3

First of all, your evidence is VERY un-relative. Global warming happens over time. The key words in that sentence is "over time". You wouldn't one year just find a whole mass of hurricanes and have huge temperature differences. We're talking 0.5 degrees or so a year. However, I do agree with you on the question. How could you look at the records over time and say something weird isn't happening.

Answer 4

Don't feel whatever you learn and simplest one million/two of what you spot. Of path, Global warming is truly. The final Ice age has long gone away, has it no longer? So, we have got to have international warming. Do persons give a contribution to international warming? Probably a few small quantity, in the end we ARE Warm and we breath in oxygen and breath out CO2, we have got to be facet of the situation. What is Al Gore going to do approximately it? Kill a complete lot of persons? Invariably that's what Socialists do after they take manage of a nation. Is that greater than destroying their economic climate and inflicting hundreds of thousands to starve to dying?

Answer 5

To some extents it's understandable. In the past governments and big business have been guilty (by their own admissions) of hiding the facts, fabricating evidence and engaging in a policy of discrediting the science. A few years ago several governments, including the Bush Administration, denied or downplayed global warming as did most of the major oil companies.

Today there isn't a single governemnt on the planet that refutes global warming and every major oil company in the world acknowledges the problem. Big business has also changed sides and at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland the CEO's of the worlds 1000 biggest organisations unilaterally declared that climate change was "the most critical problem facing humanity".

In today's society global warming sceptics are far more likely to be individuals rather than governments, businesses or other organizations. The country with the highest proportion of sceptics is the US where 21% of the population do not consider climate change to be a serious problem, this compares to a worldwide figure of 8%.

In the past people who denied global warming stood shoulder to shoulder with powerful and influential allies and rather than question what was said or ask to see evidence they simply beleived what they were told. Today these people stand in isolation, gone are the powerful allies and gone are the sources of 'evidence' to refute global warming. I can't speak for indivuduals but I would suspect that the reason some people refuse to accept global warming is through stubbornness, the risk of losing face when they 'switch sides', the fact that in accepting it's a problem means also accepting they're part of the problem and of course, by accepting global warming they have to start taking responsibility and doing things differently.

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This is now going to become a long answer but I'd just like to comment on Larry's answer (above). His is one of the very few well constructed arguments against global warming that I've seen on this forum, it states scientific fact, doesn't lower the debate to the level of a playground slanging match and has been well constructed by an onviously intelligent person.

However, good though it is there are flaws in the arguments.

The world certainly has been warmer in the past than it is today - much warmer and in fact, although we're all talking about global warming, the world is also in a global cooling phase and has been for 50 million years. Climatic evidence can be traced back some 542 million years using oxygen isotopes, any earlier and the planet was inhabited by single celled organisms and extrapolation of data is very unreliable. During the half billion years of known climate there have been at least 4 times when the world was much warmer than it currently is and when there was no ice at all (technically we're in an ice age now and will be until the polar ice caps melt completely).

These natural cycles (of which there are cycles within cycles within cycles within cycles) occur over very long periods of time and see temperature changes measured in thousands of a degree per year. What we're seeing now is a rise in temperatures far faster than anything that's ever been known before; currently 31.2 times as fast as could be attributed to natural cycles.

Back in the 70's the concept of global cooling was examined (just as it is currently being examined) it certainly wasn't screamed about. Scientists were studying what's known as the Milankovich Cycles and accurately predicted that they would cause the world to cool down. In fact, if anyone cares to retreive the scientific archives from the 1970's they'll see that what the scientists said about global cooling was completely accurate.

To condense climate change to an annual anomoly is somewhat distorting the facts. It's not just the last couple of years that the world has been warming up but the last 250 years, global warming was actually first discussed scientifically in 1811 although back then the dynamics weren't understood. As far back as 1896 scientists began to warn of the effects of global warming.

The late Middle Ages were not warmer than they are now, there was a period known as the Medieval Warm Period in which the global average temperatures reached an above average level after rising by 0.4 degrees C during the preceeding 1000 years, this is the same increase that we've experienced in the last 25 years, temperatures recently have been rising 40 times as fast as in the Middle Ages.

Larry asks if global warming is a bad thing. The answer is that some people will benefit but far more people will suffer. If we lived an agriculturally intensive lifestyle in semi permenant settlements like people did in the Middle Ages then it would be easy to uproot and resettle somewhere else. Nowadays of course the world is completely different, we have major cities, complicated infrastructures, global economies etc. Today a sea level rise of a few feet would flood London, New York, Miami and over 100 coastal cities with populations in excess of a million people. That sort of event would be catastrophic, in the Middle Ages if that happened you'd build a hut somewhere else and plant seeds in a different field - no big deal. Estimates are that by 2100 half a billion people will have to resettle, the World Health Organisation anticipates tens of millions more cases of malarie each year. These are just a couple of examples.

Answer 6

I think global warming is sumthing natural that happens after a few millions of years like the ice age which happened when ther were no cars watsoever.
Its a good excuse for governments to make u pay extra for fuel and car use.




BTW Larry r knows wat hes talkin about

Answer 7

Let me ask you this:
How can scientist predict how the world will be in 10-100 years if they can't even predict a weeks forcast correctly

Answer 8

the same way pple like u can say that it IS real without proof to back it up :)

evidence != proof

Answer 9

no, it's about time!!!!!!!!!!!