Global warming or just an earthly cycle that we haven't seen or know about by scientific means?

Question

Everything with life has a cycle so how are we sure that global warming actually exists today? Maybe the changes we are seeing are just part of the cycling of our great earth?What do you think and why?

Answer 1

It has been known and recognized scientifically and resigned to by the public for many centuries that our orbit around the Sun is not centered with the Sun. We get closer in summer and farther in winter until the closest orbit comes around, then we gradually move back outward.
Then, slowly, a few clucks were heard squawking about a paranoid delusion that man was causing it, and the media propagandized it down some more gullible citizen befuddlement and distraction away from more important matters like attacks on the Constitution and Bill of Rights!!

Answer 2

I believe the planet is warming, why I am not sure. Cycles are interesting, they are based on our limited knowledge.

Theories on the cause are theories, no proof. The planet has had other periods of time of heat, for example the period of dinosaurs. Can not recall the scientific name at the moment.

Also, the sun is believed to heating up other planets in our universe more than ever before.

Interesting fact: In 1903 Niagara Falls dried up due to drought.

Answer 3

99% sure it's happening, better than 90% sure that the major factor is human activity: the official position of the world's scientists that are prominent in this field.
(And even then, at the latest major conference, more of them were objecting that governments were trying to make them water-down their statements than were alleging scare-mongering.)

Latest measurements of arctic ice melt have indicated that it's going much faster than had been thought... and that wasn't built into the IPCC report and conclusions, which were largely conservative.

A variety of factors have led to this view, but the biggest is probablythe *rate* of change of temperature.

Don't forget, only 35 years ago the expectation, based on cycles, was for the onset of an ice-age. And that still holds, everything else being equal, which it clearly isn't.

Answer 4

It is true that the climate undergoes cyclical changes, however, no natural cause has be identified for the current level of warming. There is no theory that explains how a rise in carbon dioxide would not result in warming, and no natural precedents exhibited the kind of warming we are now experiencing.

Answer 5

Heh... wouldn't that be nice.

I want to believe it's not happening. Life would be so much simpler.

But I'm a skeptic. I don't believe it unless I see the hard data. And I've seen the hard data and global warming is the real deal, and the overwhelming evidence is that we are causing it.

Doesn't matter anyway, even if we weren't causing it, we need to UN-cause it, because it'll wreck the economy, destroy real estate values, and ... oh yeah, kill millions of people.

We're going to spend money on this one way or the other. Question is, do we want to spend money on super-cool new cars, gadgets and houses? Or do we want to spend it feeding refugees and rebuilding destroyed cities like New Orleans. We definitely WILL spend money one way or the other.

Me, I prefer gadgets.

Answer 6

No educated person will make the claim that global warming is a myth. What people dispute is the question does increases in co2 cause temperatures to rise? and if so, by how much?

There is also the belief that it is not humans but the sun that contributed to the earth's warming. Scientists long held this belief and would measure the sunspot activity going back centuries. Sunspot activity strongly correlates with levels of Carbon 14 and Berrylium 10 isotopes found in tree rings and ice cores. Therefore, accurate, long term reconstructions of sunspot activity can be made with low margins of error. The reconstructions of sunspot activity correlate strongly with almost every reconstruction of global temperature.

A recent paper by Dr. Jan Veizer of Ottawa, Canada, based on dozens of studies and his own research of 40 years, concluded that solar activity has been the “climate driver” for billions of years. While the climate can be affected by the many factors , it is the sun and its effects that have caused changes in climate for 4 billion years. Dr Veizer first set out to prove that CO2 was historically what caused changes in climate, but noted, “Personally, this last decade has been a trying period because of the years of internal struggle between what I wanted to believe and where the empirical record and its logic were leading me.”

Do you think this person arrived at his conclusion from some blog? He arrived at his conclusion because he found there is a better correlation between sun spot activity and temperatures than co2 and temperatures. This is from his own work and scientific journals. More info here:
http://www.geocraft.com/wvfossils/refere...

Take the basic premise that increases in co2 will increase temperature. From the start of this century co2 levels were increasing slowly and then started to shoot up during the late 50's. So according to the theory, temperatures should have risen at a slow and constant rate until 1960 and at a faster rate after that.

In reality temperatures started to increase at around 1910 and rose steadily until 1940. It then fell until 1975. It rose until 1998 and has been constant ever since. According to the co2 theory temperatures should not have risen as fast during the early part of the century and they should not have fallen for three decades during the mid century.

The sun spot theory correlates better up until 1960. Then temperatures kept falling but sun spot activity kept rising. But during the same period of time there were strong La Nina (cold water ocean currents) events that kept temperatures low, after the La nina events subsided temperatures started to rise again to match the sun spot cycle.

This theory has its critics. The evidence is empirical (cause and effect). There are still a lot of questions to be answered. But global warming theorists claim that the correlation is irrelevant. And since all questions cannot be answered it is untrue.

But that is the nature of science. Scientists are by nature sceptical. You do not prove a theory. You put it out and others attack it, and if it withstands scrutiny the theory becomes accepted.

But you have to wonder. In 1988 Newsweek published an article on global warming saying all scientists agree. That was before the study of climate change even began. And when scientists started to question the theory, they were immediately attacked and their motives were questioned. Just the notion of unanimity is outrageous. To say with certainty that co2 causes temperature increases you have to answer questions like what are the effects of the sun, the oceans (they do not even know what causes, el ninos and la ninas), how much co2 do humans produce. Global warming theorists say that the cooling in the mid century was due to sulphates, which act as a cooling agent. Then you have to produce studies that prove sulphates acts as a cooling agent.
Temperatures have fluctuated through out earth's history, what caused those to fluctuate. So to believe the notion of unanimity is to believe that all of these questions and many, many , many more were answered in a few years.

The reason why they are claiming unanimity is because they do not want you to question the anomalies like the mid century drop in temperatures. After all who are you and I to question the consensus of scientists. If they say it is true it must be true. But I can assure you, scientists are questioning the science, and you should be also. The notion that sulphates caused the drop in mid century temperatures is just a theory. The graph that they show does not show any correlation between temperatures and sulphates.

How about the United Nations that say co2 causes global warming. The decisions are more political bases than scientific. More info here:

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/promet...
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa...
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story...

Finally if you want more info, here is a good lecture. It is by a climatologist who says flat out, here is a biased opinion to counter act the biased opinions in the media so you can make up your own mind. In the past when I have just recommended this link, with no comments what so ever, people have given me the thumbs down. Apparently they think people are stupid enough that they can not make up their own minds.
http://www.fcpp.org/main/media_file_wm.p...