Why do GW supporters quote generalised links and no facts?

Question

I have looked at lots of answers to GW questions and found lots of people argue for GW caused by humans, but very few give factual links or even facts.All seem to be speculation and third party "he said she said". Most comments are not accurate or just plain untruths. Most seem to be irrational "the world is going to end" ranting. Arguements for GW as a natural process seem to be genuine historical facts and appear to be rational in their presentation. Such as Ice ages and co2 levels have been a thousand times higher in the period of the dinosaurs. Why are facts like these totally ignored by GW supporters?

Having looked at the links provided..none give facts and most is speculation. Here is one of the pro warming quotes,"It is true that there are big uncertainties about the accuracy of all past temperature reconstructions, and that these uncertainties have sometimes been ignored or glossed over by those who have presented the hockey stick as evidence for global warming. New scientist quote.

Also the graphs show a drop in temperature after WW2 .Why did GW take a break for a few years? Why was Greenland Green around 1000years ago....what caused GW then? There appears to be more information raising questions about human GW theorys on the pro warming sites

Answer 1

The problem lies in politics. Plain and simple. Al Gore hates George Bush. Al Gore's supporters hate George Bush. George said, "Hold on. Let's check the science." Al's side said, "You're a denier!"

Now many of George's supporters hate Al Gore. They say, "Global warming is a hoax!"

So you get two sides that make stupid arguments involving something that a truly open minded person would see as a simple problem.

1. The world is getting hotter.
2. The solar system is getting hotter.
3. CO2 does not cause warming.
4. Man does pollute and really should stop.
5. Reducing CO2 won't stop it from happening but it may help end it sooner.
6. If you really want to reduce CO2 in the air, then just start planting more trees.
7. Carbon offsets do not reduce CO2 because they're just a slick way of allowing a polluter to pollute with a clear conscience.
8. The main aim of the pro-Gore people is not cleaning up the Earth but rather gaining control of government and the minds of people. If they really cared about the environment and global warming, they'd start advocating tree planting programs and put pressure on South America to end deforestation.

Man really does affect the planet. Take a look at the deadzones around the nickel processing plants in Canada that make the batteries for hybrid cars that are supposed to be good for the environment.

The truly Earth conscious person would look into ways to make more fuel efficient vehicles, drill with minimal enviromental impact, find renewable fuels without starving people or animals, and plant trees.

Why aren't any of the politicians (Al included) that say they're for the enviroment speaking out against deforestation? There's a country in Asia (I forget which) that has a program to plant over a million trees this year. The UN has a program called The Billion Tree Program that is not heralded at all by environmentalists or even the Al Gore-mentalists.

Come on! Quit whining and start planting!

Answer 2

Facts such as those that you mentioned aren't ignored.

One problem is that climatology and global warming are not simple subjects. To provide an accurate answer to even a simple question requires a lengthy and technical response, this is beyond the requirements and comprehension of many people who would prefer a simple yes / no type answer.

Look back at some of my answers, every statement is factual and can be coroborated. I don't generally include links as it is a time consuming process to find them but that doesn't mean they don't exist.

Arguments that GW is natural are not remotely rational as they ignore many of the most fundemental drivers of our climate. There are natural cycles that affect our climate but they do so over timescales of thousands and millions of years, not a few decades. Temps have fallen and risen in the past but never even close to the current rate of change. Natural cycles operate within natural parameters, the climate is now outside those parameters.

We know about natural cycles, there are lots of them , they're complex, they interact, they have a 'cause and effect' action, there are couplings and feedbacks. All this and much more, is known, documented and taken into account but in the larger scheme of things it accounts for only a small proportion of the current warming.

It's often necessary to focus only on the salient facts, often the points you mentioned are extraneous because they are of little or no significance.

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RE: YOUR ADDITIONAL POINTS

Just as some gases trap heat and cause warming there are other gases that reflect heat and lead to cooling. The primary gas that contributes to cooling is sulphur dioxide, it has a reflective property that returns solar radiation (sunlight) back into space before it reaches Earth, the decline in radiation penetration (less sun) leads to a cooling of the planet.

From the 1940's onwards heavy industry, power generation, gas production (back then it was extracted from coal) etc all produced massive quantities of sulphur dioxide, other suphates and coolants which lead to global cooling. The warming was still going on but was masked by the more powerful cooling.

The atmosphere become so polluted that it was killing thousands of people, consequently Clean Air Acts were passed, the pollutants removed from the atmosphere and the cooling gave way once again to warming.

It still happens from time to time in the aftermath of large volcanoes. These too emit large quantities of sulphur dioxide which causes cooling. The last major eruption on the planet occurred in 1991 when Mount Pinatubo erupted, for the following few years global temps fell by as much as 0.6°C.

Greenland: 1000 years ago Greenland was first settled by Eirik Raude (AKA Eric the Red), the legendary Norse Viking who had been exiled from his native country for the act of mass murder. He was exiled to Iceland and not having learned his lesson the first time was subsequently exiled from there for the same reasons. He landed on Greenland and established a community on the southwestern tip, that being the only habitable part of the country. The community fared reasonably well and survived there for about 400 years.

Compare the Greenland of 1000 years ago with that of today. Back in 984 (the Year Eirik Raude landed) there were two places, both in the south west, that were not covered in ice for part of the year. Today, virtually the entire coastline is ice free and in some places the coastal strip extends inland by almost 200 kilometres. Communities exist on all sides of Greenland.

The naming of the country was a piece of Viking propoganda. It was called Green Land by Eric the Red so as to attract potential settlers to his fledgling communities.

All this historical info and more can be found in The Saga Of Eric The Red - Eirik Raude's Biography, it's available as a free download from Project Gutenberg.

Answer 3

I doubt that you've looked at many questions and answers here, because most of the global warming "supporters" (I prefer to call them "acknowledgers") provide tons of scientific evidence (at least those who answer frequently). On the contrary, your description fits global warming denieres to a "T". They rarely provide any evidence, and "historical facts" don't tell nearly the whole story.

Here's my standard evidence answer. I give it so frequently that I have it saved in a Word document.

Basically we know it's warming, and we've measured how much:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2005/ann/global-blended-temp-pg.gif

Scientists have a good idea how the Sun and the Earth's natural cycles and volcanoes and all those natural effects change the global climate, so they've gone back and checked to see if they could be responsible for the current global warming. What they found is:

Over the past 30 years, all solar effects on the global climate have been in the direction of (slight) cooling, not warming. This is during a very rapid period of global warming.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6290228.stm
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf

So the Sun certainly isn't a large factor in the current warming. They've also looked at natural cycles, and found that we should be in the middle of a cooling period right now.

"An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that 'Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovich_cycle

So it's definitely not the Earth's natural cycles. They looked at volcanoes, and found that

a) volcanoes cause more global cooling than warming, because the particles they emit block sunlight

b) humans emit over 100 times more CO2 than volcanoes annually

http://www.gaspig.com/volcano.htm

So it's certainly not due to volcanoes. Then they looked at human greenhouse gas emissions. We know how much atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased over the past 50 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbon_Dioxide.png

And we know from isotope ratios that this increase is due entirely to human emissions from burning fossil fuels. We know how much of a greenhouse effect these gases like carbon dioxide have, and the increase we've seen is enough to have caused almost all of the warming we've seen over the past 30 years (about 80-90%). You can see a model of the various factors over the past century here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution.png

This is enough evidence to convince almost all climate scientists that humans are the primary cause of the current global warming.

Enough links and facts for you? I've got plenty more if you're interested.

Answer 4

1. Ice ages are triggered by small changes in Earth's orbit, called "orbital forcing" by climatologists, or Milankovitch cycles by astronomers. Since Earth's orbit can be computed for thousands of years into the past and future, we know that orbital forcing peaked 6000 years ago, during the Holocene Maxiumum, and should be slowly cooling the planet right now. Here's the peer-reviewed science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/207/4434/943

2. CO2 levels were 1000 times higher than today on the early earth, before plants evolved. The Sun was also 25% less energetic at that time too. Without those high CO2 levels and the associated greenhouse effect, the entire planet would have been like Antarctica and life never would have evolved. Here's a link to the science:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v277/n5698/abs/277640a0.html

In more recent geologic time, the last time CO2 levels were this high over a sustained period, there were no polar icecaps. If that were to happen today, sea levels would rise 260 feet. Here's a link to the science from the USGS:
http://cegis.usgs.gov/sea_level_rise.html

3. World surface temperatures are getting warmer, and this trend has accelerated since the mid 1970's. Almost no scientist in the 21st century has disputed this basic fact, even among the most diehard GW skeptics. Here is the data from NASA / GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
... and from the UK's Hadley Centre:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/

As I said, even GW skeptics accept that it's getting warmer; the major dispute is what's causing it: human beings, through increased greenhouse gases in the air? Or natural causes, like the Sun? The dispute is more political than scientific, though, because the scientific case for increased greenhouse effect is rock solid.

If the Sun is causing the current warmth, then we're getting more energy, and the whole atmosphere should be getting warmer. But if it's greenhouse, then we're getting the same amount of energy, but it's being distributed differently: more heat is trapped at the surface, and less heat is escaping to the stratosphere. So if it's the Sun, the stratosphere should be warming, but if it's greenhouse, the stratosphere should be cooling.

In fact, the stratosphere has been on a long-term cooling trend ever since we've been keeping radiosonde balloon records in the 1950's. Here's the data:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/images/update_images/global_upper_air.png
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadat/hadat2/hadat2_monthly_global_mean.txt
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/temp/sterin/sterin.html

4. If it's the Sun, we're getting more energy during the day, and daytime temperatures should be rising fastest. But if it's greenhouse, we're losing less heat at night, and nighttime temperatures should be rising fastest. So if it's the sun, the difference between day and night temperatures should be increasing, but if it's greenhouse, the day-night difference should be decreasing.

In fact, the daily temperature range has been decreasing throughout the 20th century. Here's the science:
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0450(1984)023%3C1489:DDTRIT%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://ams.allenpress.com/perlserv/?request=get-abstract&doi=10.1175%2F1520-0477(1993)074%3C1007%3AANPORG%3E2.0.CO%3B2
http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/jma/2004GL019998.pdf

5. Total solar irradiance has been measured by satellite since 1978, and during that time it has shown the normal 11-year cycle, but no long-term trend. Here's the data:
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/solarda3.html

6. Scientists have looked closely at the solar hypothesis and have strongly refuted it. Here's the peer-reviewed science:
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a/rspa20071880.pdf
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/publications/preprints/pp2006/MPA2001.pdf

7. CO2 levels in the air were stable for 10,000 years prior to the industrial revolution, at about 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv). Since 1800, CO2 levels have risen 38%, to 384 ppmv, with no end in sight. Here's the modern data...
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
... and the ice core data ...
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/law/law.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/domec/domec_epica_data.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok_data.html
... and a graph showing how it fits together:
http://www.columbusnavigation.com/co2.html

8. We know that the excess CO2 in the air is caused by burning of fossil fuels, for two reasons. First, because the sharp rise in atmospheric CO2 started exactly when humans began burning coal in large quantities (see the graph linked above); and second, because when we do isotopic analysis of the CO2 we find increasing amounts of "old" carbon combined with "young" oxygen. Here are the peer-reviewed papers:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1984JGR....8911731S
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mksg/teb/1999/00000051/00000002/art00005
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/256/5053/74

So what's left to prove?

Answer 5

When CO2 levels were higher, coastlines and plant life were very different. That would be disastrous for our modern society. The world won't end, but we'll be badly damaged if we don't do something.

Completely factual links proving global warming is real and mostly caused by us. With many facts, backed up by many references to the scientific literature. The first one is quite short, but educational. It's taken mostly from the factual source below. I won't add any more words, just look at the links.

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

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/dn11462

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

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html
summarized at:
http://www.ipcc.ch/SPM2feb07.pdf

http://www.realclimate.org
"climate science from climate scientists"

Answer 6

I amswered this question for another person. Global warming is part of a natural cycle of warming and heating. However, to ignore the detrimental effects of greenhouse gasses would be foolish. Anything we can do to improve air quality is important. The global warming debate is being used to drive the development of alternative technologies. Pollution is not the cause of global warming but polution is augmenting a natural cyclic change.

Answer 7

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Answer 8

Look harder, some do some dont. The same is true of both sides of the argument, so what's your point?

Answer 9

Because they watch Fox (Faux) News.

Answer 10

You'll notice the dinosaurs are no longer with us.......

climate change is a mother*******