global warming:fact or fiction?

Answer 1

global warming: fact
whether human activity caused this: in debate

Answer 2

It's a mixed bag.
Yes the climate has warmed slightly, less than one degree but then the climate is ALWAYS changing. It runs in cycles. The end of the upper Middle ages had a spell of Global Warming that made the black plague even more of a living hell. That was followed by the 'Little Ice Age.'
Not to mention as recent as the 1970's the consensus of the media and scientific community was the fear we were heading for a horrible Ice Age. You can go back and read the News Week and Time articles.
So what effect does mankind have on these cycles? The truth is we aren't entirely sure. I am sure we do have some effect but Al Gore is pushing the boundaries of fact and fiction.
Right now the liberals are using it as a power play. But if the situation was reversed the conservatives would do the same.

Answer 3

I will agree that it is fact, but only a current fact. Go talk to someone that remembers things from the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, the common fear was that we were going into an ICE AGE because the polar caps seemed to be growing at an alarming rate and climates that were typically warm, were cooling down. I believe that the planet goes through cycles every 100 or so years. I think that we just came out of a cold-cycle and are now going into a warm-cycle, hence the 'global warming'. Albeit, we are speeding it up with pollutants that were not present during the last time it cycled, I still believe that it is a natural cycle.

Answer 4

I won't say Global warming is a fiction, but it is clear that we don't have a good idea of what is causing it. When we jump to conclusions about causation we all but ensure that we will be unable to deal with what may be a very serious problem.

Thomas Sowell, the famous conservative newspaper columnist, made some insightful comments about this problem:

"Clouds, or water vapor, are 95% of global warming gases. Water vapor is primarily responsible for the effect of holding heat near the earth's surface that would otherwise dissipate into space. And remember that the computer models used by Gore and others are NOT ABLE TO PREDICT THE MOVEMENTS AND ACTIONS OF WATER VAPOR.

"So 95% of the cause of the greenhouse effect is simply ignored by [Al Gore's] research. This means he's focused on 5% of the cause, giving it much too much credit for the effect."

It's hard to argue with Sowell's logic here.

I think we should focus more on finding out about "The
movements and actions of water vapor" and less about writing books and creating movies that suggest we know how man contributes to global warming.

Answer 5

I guess that former astronaut, Richard "Bob" Truly, gave you the long answer. Here's the short answer. If you have studied Semantics, you'll recognize, "The map is not the territory." I understand that to mean, that no matter how detailed you make the map of something, you never arrive at the point where the map is the exact equal of the territory. Now apply that globally and consider the measurements taken at a spot here and a spot there, and somebody needing to find a correlation that says one thing is responsible for another, so they extrapolate to make their all-inclusive "map." It's PC right now to jump on the bandwagon. Google the Earth and look at the biosphere. Do you see any people, cities or cans of aerosol deodorant? My point is that we are just too small in the scheme of things to cause a planetary change.

Answer 6

A little bit of both.

Some of the predictions are not realistic.

Yes, average temperature on Earth is going up... at about 1/3 of the rate predicted 10 years ago, depite higher than predicted energy use increase.

The warming isn't 100% due to CO/CO2 and other greenhouse gas production by man... there's some increased solar output too.

Rather than worrying about global warming... we should be concerned more about chemical and other pollution that eventually ends up in the oceans.

Kill off the oceans and then we ARE really in trouble.

Answer 7

Global Warming: Fact

Global Warming caused by human actions: Fiction

Take the time to educate yourself on the matter, look past the lies and poor science the Al Gore types are using to pass a POLITICAL agenda off as scientific.

Answer 8

Fiction. If ''global warming'' is melting the polar caps then how did they find a squadron of aircraft that landed in 1940's under 250 feet of ice in the 1980's?

http://www.straight-talk.net/evolution/glacier-girl.htm

Answer 9

Fact. This is science and what counts is the data, not unsupported theories.

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)
Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut and the first Commander of the Naval Space Command

Here are two summaries of the mountain of peer reviewed data that convinced Admiral Truly, short and long.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

It's (mostly) not the sun:

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/sun-on-earth/FAQ2.html

And the first graph aboves shows that the sun is responsible for about 10% of it. When someone says it's the sun they're saying that thousands of climatologists are stupid and don't look at the solar data. That's ridiculous.

Science is quite good about exposing bad science or hoaxes:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/ATG/polywater.html

There's a large number of people who agree that it is real and mostly caused by us, who are not liberals, environmentalists, stupid, or conceivably part of a "conspiracy". Just three examples of many:

"Global warming is real, now, and it must be addressed."

Lee Scott, CEO, Wal-Mart

"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."

Senator John McCain, Republican, Arizona

“DuPont believes that action is warranted, not further debate."

Charles O. Holliday, Jr., CEO, DuPont

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/329.php?nid=&id=&pnt=329&lb=hmpg1

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686 and:

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton's second law of dynamics. Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point,You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

Good websites for more info:

http://profend.com/global-warming/

http://www.realclimate.org

"climate science from climate scientists"

Good site which analyzes the arguments of the skeptics:

http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics

Answer 10

My husband and I fight about this issue often - he believes that it is just a natural cycle for the earth and we'd be in the same boat either way. I think he is crazy and just doesn't want to take responsibility.

The earth does have natural cycles, but to suggest that all these people and their activities don't have a negative impact is short-sighted and naive.

It is fact. Thousands of scientists worldwide have concluded this FACT.

Answer 11

Global warming is a fact which is based upon research studies.