Global Warming. Fact or Fiction?

Question

I don't know how to feel, and I have seen Al Gore's movie.

Answer 1

Many natural and man-made products produce emissions into the atmosphere which increases climate change.
http://www.mtpc.org/cleanenergy/important/envemissions.htm

Answer 2

It's absolutely clear that we have warmed up. The question is first, are humans even a part of causing it, and second what should we do if we are a part of it.

I don't think normal people even need to look into it. From my perspective if we take steps to make a sustainable world then we'll have a better place to live, we'll have new jobs in that new technology field, and we'll actually put in place technology that will help our kids, unlike current.

So if the entire worlds govt scientists are right we'd be better off changing, and if they're wrong we'd still be better off changing.

So I don't even get the importance of figuring it out. It's a win-win situation to change.

Answer 3

Its a fact, however all the dooms day jargon you are being fed is not supported by science.

The earth warms itself and reverts to ice age, it has done so over and over again. It does this in periods lasting tens of thousands of years. There will be no major results in the next 50 years, sorry but the earth does not operate that fast.

Animals will go extinct as they have during past warming cycles, this is the process of natural selection. Most animals will migrate with the climate change and survive.

Humans survived the last ice age for several reasons. 1. they were smart enough to seek shelter. 2. they are warm blooded mammals. Modern man will have a much easier time dealing with climate change.








Countless animals and plants have gone extinct in the past and numerous ice ages and warming periods have already happened. There is no cause for alarm, man will easily adjust to the slow and subtle changes coming in the distant future

Answer 4

Whether or not global temperatures rise or fall it has nothing to do with man's behavior. I have been around a long time and believe me when I tell you that this is just another scam being foisted on us by agenda driven politics, anti-capitalism and suppression of scientific discourse produced by federal grant money. There have been many such 'chicken little' claims made in the past. This is just the latest.

Read the link.

Answer 5

Definitely warming, but definitely not unprecedented in human history.

http://www.capca-carolinas.org/Fall%202006%20Presentations/Roy%20W.%20Spencer.pdf

In fact global warming seems to have reached a plateau over the past few years, the next several years will probably determine if this is just primarily a natural cycle or the byproduct of humanities actions.

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

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Answer 6

Fact - here's the evidence.

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.

Answer 7

It's a fact, there is no debate there. To the best of our knowledge, the earth has warmed by approximately 1 degree celcius over the past 100 years.

Would you like to ask any more questions like why is this happening? How long is it likely to continue?

Answer 8

Seems like an easy enough question to answer but to answer and provide an explanation requires an understanding of our climate and particularly the role played by the greenhouse gases.

I won't go into detail although you can email me for further info about any aspect if you wish...

Earth is only habitable because of the greenhouse gases in the atmopshere, remove them and the planet becomes a ball of ice. They are, for want of a better description, our insulation. They retain heat that originates from the Sun, the more greenhouse gases there are the more heat is retained.

Ever since humans first appeared on the planet levels of greenhouse gases have been fairly constant, varying between 180 and 290 parts per million by volume of the atmopshere. Since the onset of industrialisation levels have dramatically increased and are now at 387ppmv - the sort of change we would expect to see happening naturally over millions of years has been produced by humans in less than 200 years.

This increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases can't do anything other than to cause the planet to warm and that's because of a simple physical property possessed by the gases we call the greenhouse gases.

This is the human influence on our climate and explains why temperatures are rising faster now than has ever before been known, and similarly, greenhouse gas concentrations are rising faster than has ever before been known.

It's not all human induced. There are, as some skeptics point out, natural cycles at work. Explaining them would be complicated, there's several of them and they affect our planet in different ways. The important thing is that they are cycles and are therefore predictable. As such, we know where in each of the cycles our planet is and can calculate the net warming and cooling effects of them. When we do the calculations we see that the planet should be warming very slowly of it's own accord, when we look back at history this is indeed what we find.

In the last 10,000 years the planet has warmed by 1°C - as expected, that's equivalent to 0.0001°C per year. Currently the planet is warming by 0.0177°C per year, far beyond the capabilities of any natural cycle.

The 10,000 year analogy is an over-simplification, there's many more factors to be taken into account. When everything is factored into one massive equation the result is that a minimum of 80% of the current warming is human induced and that the most likely range is between 90 and 95%.

Climate science is a complicated subject but an interesting one. If you'd like to know about global warming (and much more) then I'd recommend studying it.

Answer 9

Climate change is a fact...

Mankind being the primary cause is fiction.

Al Gore's movie pure BS!

Answer 10

Honestly, no one really knows. Since it hasn't really happened yet. It's mostly theories. Although like the previous answerer said, climate change is a fact. Although if it is caused by humans is a matter of opinion, for now.