Do you think Global Warming is a natural occurance?

Question

please could you give a reason why?
i need some reasons that global warming is not caused by humans for my geography paper.

Answer 1

Yes - Man is far too insignificant to have any impact on the climate.

The majority of scientist now see the Sun as the source for all of Earth's warmth, and natural variations of the Sun's output to be the cause for some warming on Earth.

Scientist now see co2 as being an effect rather than the cause of warming.

Answer 2

Our planet has been around for a very long time (a little over 4.5 billion years) and it's always been either warming or cooling. For all the time the world has been here humans have been around for a very short time (if the world were a day old humans would have been around for 20 seconds). In the past these changes have been entirely natural. There's two main forces at work - the cycles in the way the Earth moves and the cycles in the amount of heat energy from the sun. We have a good understanding of many of these cycles but there may be some very long term solar cycles we haven't yet identified. What we do know is how much these cycles affect our climate and the answer is not by much. Certainly not in the short term, over thousands and millions of years they can and do have a significant effect. Perhaps the most obvious of which is the coming and going of ice ages. What we're experiencing now is very different to anything that can be put down to natural cycles, primarily because the world is warming up so much faster than could ever happen naturally. To give you an example. 18,000 years ago the glaciers began to melt (often called the last ice age), this was brought about because of an extremely rapid natural rise in temperatures, such dramatic temperature changes are very rare in nature. Even though these natural rises were dramatic they pale into insignificance compared to the current rate at which temperatures are rising - 17 times as fast. We know why the temperatures are rising so fast, it's because of the increased levels of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The way they work isn't a mystery and has been understood for a long time. Put simply, the more greenhouse gases there are the hotter the planet becomes (it works the other way around as well, warming produces greenhouse gases). To answer your question - global warming in the past has been entirely natural, the current global warming is way beyond anything natural and human activity is largely to blame. If you'd like to know more some terms you could search for are Milankovitch Cycles, Solar Variation and Feedback Effect.

Answer 3

Yes. Climate change is a natural process, so our climate is always either getting warmer, colder, wetter or dryer.
Does human activity cause the present warming cycle? No.
does human contribute to the present warming cycle? Yes, but only fractionally.
Both the amount of warming and the degree to which human activity is responsible have been grossly exaggerated, mostly for political reasons.
Al Gore film is a typical example, it is shot through with half truths, half lies, exaggerations and distortions. It is a highly competent piece of propaganda, but as science, it is junk.





The UK department of education has been taken to the high court by a father claiming that Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" is unfit for schools because it is politically biased and contains serious scientific inaccuracies and sentimental mush.

The presiding Justice Burton will make a final ruling within a week but has already stated that the film does promote partisan political views. This is resulting in the government education system having to amend their Guidance Notes to make clear that:

1.) The film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument.

2.) If teachers present the film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1966 and guilty of political indoctrination.

3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.

The eleven inaccuracies are:

1. The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

2. The film suggests evidence from ice cores covering the last 650,000 years proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases. The court found that the film was misleading due to the fact that the actual evidence from those ice cores demonstrate that the CO2 rises actually followed temperature increases by 800 to 2000 years and so could not have been causative.

3. The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.

4. The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.

5. The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr. Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.

6. The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

7. The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

8. The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

9. The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

10. The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

11. The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government is unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.


For a detailed assessment of the science of the film, go to

http://www.cei.org/sections/section.cfm?section=1

Answer 4

There is certainly a very high probability that the majority of global warming is natural, just as it must have been natural during the medieval warm period and roman warm period as well as 1100 BC.

http://www.longrangeweather.com/images/GTEMPS.gif

Increases in solar output over the last 100 years easily directly accounts for up to 50% of the warming. The pacific decadal oscillation (PDO) which has a 25-30 year cycle, has also contributed to the warming observed over the last 25 years. The PDO is beginning it's cool phase and should cause the climate to cool over the next 25 - 30 years.


http://www.spacedaily.com/news/pacific-02n.html

The combination of the PDO starting a new cycle and solar output forecast to drop over the next 2 solar cycles should create a much cooler climate in the near future. I would however prefer global warming to continue, but that is not the way the world works, at least during an interglacial period.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm

Answer 5

Earth has seen many ice ages and periods between ice ages that were far warmer that now, where all polar ice melted. All those past warm periods were before humans even appeared on Earth, so it is at least reasonable to assume that the present warming could have occurred even without human influence. The question is if the present warming is caused by humans; or enhanced beyond what it would be naturally by humans.

Answer 6

Did you know humans contribute less than 1% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere?
I bet you didn't.
http://mysite.verizon.net/mhieb/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

Nobody denies the earth is warming, however there is an incredible amount of debate and scientific research that says that it is largely natural processes that cause it.
Humans contribute of course, but it is very small.


Go here for more good comprehensive information and facts:
http://theglobalwarmingtruth.com/

Answer 7

Historically when humans were not around, obviously global warming (and cooling) were not caused by humans, and thus were a natural occurance.

The Earth goes through natural climate cycles. However, scientists have concluded that the current global warming is mostly due to human greenhouse gas emissions. It's happening far too rapidly to be natural.

Scientists know about the Earth's natural cycles, so they can predict quite accurately when they will happen. Thus they know that the current warming is not part of any natural cycle.

For your paper just talk about climate change in the past, but don't talk about the current global warming.

Answer 8

I think it is caused by both......You have milloions of cars on the road ways everyday, and factories putting stuff in the air. It is natural bcause a cow and a moose put methane in the air. How ever volcanic eruptions do put gasses in the air as well.

Answer 9

I suppose it was natural on Venus.

Maybe your teacher is looking for something like,
"The *main* reason earth is not a frozen ball of ice is that
natural processes produced gases which keep at least
part of the planet warm enough (and pressurized enough) for liquid water.

Answer 10

The governments of the world appointed a panel of experts to investigate this question and make recommendations. They are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their reports describe many sources of global warming. Some of them are natural and some are caused by human activity. I will give a reference to their website below so that you can investigate.

It is my belief that governments already knew the causes of global warming and what should be done about it before they appointed the IPCC. The problem was they were afraid to tell us the facts and so they appointed the IPCC to do it for them. They hope that we will read the reports and press our governments to make the changes so that the politicians do not have to make themselves unpopular by taking the lead.

Now what are the natural forces that can cause global warming and cooling (and have done so in the past)? There are many and they tend to balance one another but with some oscillation up and down. Occasionally some catastrophe occurs that pushes temperatures in one direction or the other more quickly and drastically than normal (such as impact from an asteroid) but generally the fluctuations are slow so that wildlife and mankind can adapt or migrate without too much difficulty.

One of the most dramatic natural processes is the one involving plankton, volcanoes and carbon dioxide (CO2). CO2 is a gas which contributes to keeping the world warmer than it would otherwise be, because it acts like a greenhouse. CO2 is absorbed by plankton as they grow in the oceans. When they die they fall to the bottom and eventually are drawn to the earth's molten core by the movement of the tectonic plates floating on top of the core. These plates grow at one edge, because of volcanic eruptions, and are drawn down into the molten core at the other. And it is because of the dead plankton being drawn into the core that the volcanic eruptions include a great deal of CO2 added to the atmosphere to be taken up by more plankton.

Another less dramatic example is cow farts and grass. Grass absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere as it grows. Cows eat the grass and return the CO2 and methane to the atmosphere when they fart. People do the same but less dramatically. There would be less greenhouse effect if we did not breed so many animals for meat so it would be a good idea to eat less meat.

Grass and other plants can also play a part without being eaten because the CO2 they absorb in growing is given off when they die and decay.

My previous examples have been examples of CO2 cycles in which what is taken from the atmosphere is returned so that the warming effect is fairly stable. There are other effects such as that of the sun itself. The heat given off by the sun varies for several reasons and so the earth would tend to get hotter and colder accordingly. However, whenever the earth gets hotter it radiates heat back into space and when it gets cooler less heat is given off in that way, so helping restore the balance. Scientists have found that fluctuations in the amount of heat received from the sun are less significant than fluctuations in the effectiveness of the greenhouse gases such as water vapour and CO2.

Now to fossil fuels (coal, oil and gas). Fossil fuels were created at a particular time in the evolution of the earth and are no longer being formed. They were formed by the compression of decaying plants and so consist largely of carbon taken as CO2 from the air when the plants were growing. This means that a great deal of the earth's carbon dioxide is presently locked up in these fossil resources and if we burn those resources the CO2 will be released to add to the greenhouse effect that such gases perform. Unfortunately, because these CO2 emissions can not be re-absorbed into coal, oil and gas as they were in the past, the burning of these resources is a one way street and has already begun to warm the earth faster than normal.

So there you are. I have told you of several natural causes of global warming but it is clear that they are balanced processes. The burning of fossil resources is an additional cause and it is not balanced. It is also inevitable that fossil resources will begin to become scarce and more expensive to extract. For both these reasons we need to recognise that our use of fossil resources should be curbed and that is what the IPCC recommends.

I hope this help. Best wishes with your paper.

Answer 11

The level of propaganda parading as science is deplorable. Of course pollution and capitalism aren't responsible but it gives an insight into the mentality and the agenda of those pushing human caused global warming. There are various oscillations in the climate mostly caused by solar cycles and longer termed ones (Milankovitch cycle) that result from wobbles in our orbit and rotational axis. Changing climates is the norm. There has never been a time when sea levels and climates were not changing. Those trying to pretend that humans are suddenly causing it to change and that that change is necessarily bad reveal a political agenda that has very little to do with science.