Problems global warming is causing?

Question

other then melting glaciers, stopping ocean currents and natural disasters are becoming more frequent, what does it do?

i can honestly say i've never had a worse answers then this. the answers are not telling me anything helpful. they either list things or tell me i'm wrong.

Answer 1

Global arming causes our taxes to go up, causes us to increase our national debt, and it causes us to lose our individual freedoms.

Answer 2

Your question does not make sense. Unless you are a complete fool you realize that global warming does NOT exist. That is FACT and NOT my opinion.
Now that you know fact from fiction I will tell what fighting a non existant problem causes:
1. I directly or indirectly leads to the death of 2,000 people (mostly children) per day. If we spent the trillions of dollars on aide instead of nonsense it would go a long way in alleviating the world of hunger and poverty.
2. The well being of society is being compromised. You can blame global warming loonies for the cost of oil and gas.
3. You need to get your facts straight. The glaciers of BOTH the North and South Poles are INCREASING 98%
4. Why was 1934 and not 2007 the warmist year ever recorded?
Please for the sake of the human race let's give this CRUEL HOAX it's proper burial

Answer 3

Global warming is actually causing lot of problems...Beside melting glaciers etc, it can cause harm to wild animals as they might lost their homes forever...
For example,
1) It can lead to the extinction of polar bears( global warming is causing an unnatural increase in Arctic temperatures, posing a threat to the thickness and extent of sea ice required by polar bears.)
2) It caused an increased in the number of hurricanes( although its seem to be great but by Science News that the increases in storm intensity are mirrored by increases in the average temperatures at the surface of the tropical oceans, suggesting that this warming is responsible for the hurricanes' greater power. And it's getting fiercer than before.

Hope you will find it useful!

Answer 4

The biggest problem that it's causing is it gives Al Gore a platform to push America into bankruptcy by convincing people that warming temperatures are man-made (even though temperatures haven't risen once since 1998).

Answer 5

Global Warming is a total fraud that has been perpetrated as a nice way to punish the American People.

Answer 6

This should help it is the complete list

Answer 7

it sometimes affect our economy, especially the aspect of tourism.

Answer 8

chaos

Answer 9

Causes

Carbon dioxide during the last 400,000 years and (inset above) the rapid rise since the Industrial Revolution; changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, known as Milankovitch cycles, are believed to be the pacemaker of the 100,000 year ice age cycle.
Recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). The monthly CO2 measurements display small seasonal oscillations in an overall yearly uptrend; each year's maximum is reached during the Northern Hemisphere's late spring, and declines during the Northern Hemisphere growing season as plants remove some CO2 from the atmosphere.Main articles: Attribution of recent climate change and scientific opinion on climate change
The Earth's climate changes in response to external forcing, including variations in its orbit around the sun (orbital forcing),[7][8][9] volcanic eruptions, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The detailed causes of the recent warming remain an active field of research, but the scientific consensus[10][11] identifies elevated levels of greenhouse gases due to human activity as the main influence. This attribution is clearest for the most recent 50 years, for which the most detailed data are available. In contrast to the scientific consensus that recent warming is mainly attributable to elevated levels of greenhouse gases, other hypotheses have been suggested to explain the observed increase in mean global temperature. One such hypothesis proposes that warming may be the result of variations in solar activity.[12][13][14][15]

None of the effects of forcing are instantaneous. The thermal inertia of the Earth's oceans and slow responses of other indirect effects mean that the Earth's current climate is not in equilibrium with the forcing imposed. Climate commitment studies indicate that even if greenhouse gases were stabilized at 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) would still occur.[16]


Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
Main article: Greenhouse effect
The greenhouse effect was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. It is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by atmospheric gases warms a planet's atmosphere and surface.

Existence of the greenhouse effect as such is not disputed. Naturally occurring greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 °C (59 °F), without which Earth would be uninhabitable.[17][18] The debate centers on how the strength of the greenhouse effect is changed when human activity increases the atmospheric concentrations of some greenhouse gases.

On Earth, the major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36–70% of the greenhouse effect (not including clouds); carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes 9–26%; methane (CH4), which causes 4–9%; and ozone, which causes 3–7%.[19][20] Some other naturally occurring gases contribute very small fractions of the greenhouse effect; one of these, nitrous oxide (N2O), is increasing in concentration owing to human activity such as agriculture. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4 have increased by 31% and 149% respectively above pre-industrial levels since 1750. These levels are considerably higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. From less direct geological evidence it is believed that CO2 values this high were last attained 20 million years ago.[21] Fossil fuel burning has produced about three-quarters of the increase in CO2 from human activity over the past 20 years. Most of the rest is due to land-use change, in particular deforestation.[22]

The present atmospheric concentration of CO2 is about 383 parts per million (ppm) by volume.[23] Future CO2 levels are expected to rise due to ongoing burning of fossil fuels and land-use change. The rate of rise will depend on uncertain economic, sociological, technological, and natural developments, but may be ultimately limited by the availability of fossil fuels. The IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios gives a wide range of future CO2 scenarios, ranging from 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100.[24] Fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to reach this level and continue emissions past 2100, if coal, tar sands or methane clathrates are extensively used.[25]

Feedbacks
Main article: Effects of global warming#Further global warming (positive feedback)
The effects of forcing agents on the climate are complicated by various feedback processes.

One of the most pronounced feedback effects relates to the evaporation of water. In the case of warming by the addition of long-lived greenhouse gases such as CO2, the initial warming will cause more water to be evaporated into the atmosphere. Since water vapor itself acts as a greenhouse gas, this causes still more warming; the warming causes more water vapor to be evaporated, and so forth until a new dynamic equilibrium concentration of water vapor is reached with a much larger greenhouse effect than that due to CO2 alone. Although this feedback process involves an increase in the absolute moisture content of the air, the relative humidity stays nearly constant or even decreases slightly because the air is warmer.[26] This feedback effect can only be reversed slowly as CO2 has a long average atmospheric lifetime.

Feedback effects due to clouds are an area of ongoing research. Seen from below, clouds emit infrared radiation back to the surface, and so exert a warming effect; seen from above, clouds reflect sunlight and emit infrared radiation to space, and so exert a cooling effect. Whether the net effect is warming or cooling depends on details such as the type and altitude of the cloud. These details are difficult to represent in climate models, in part because clouds are much smaller than the spacing between points on the computational grids of climate models. Nevertheless, cloud feedback is second only to water vapor feedback and is positive in all the models that were used in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.[26]

Another important feedback process is ice-albedo feedback.[27] When global temperatures increase, ice near the poles melts at an increasing rate. As the ice melts, land or open water takes its place. Both land and open water are on average less reflective than ice, and thus absorb more solar radiation. This causes more warming, which in turn causes more melting, and this cycle continues.

Positive feedback due to release of CO2 and CH4 from thawing permafrost, such as the frozen peat bogs in Siberia, is an additional mechanism contributing to warming.[28] A massive release of CH4 from methane clathrates could cause rapid warming, according to the clathrate gun hypothesis.

The ocean's ability to sequester carbon is expected to decline as it warms, because the resulting low nutrient levels of the mesopelagic zone limits the growth of diatoms in favor of smaller phytoplankton that are poorer biological pumps of carbon.[29]


Solar variation

Solar variation over the last 30 years.Main article: Solar variation
A few papers suggest that the Sun's contribution may have been underestimated. Two researchers at Duke University, Bruce West and Nicola Scafetta, have estimated that the Sun may have contributed about 45–50% of the increase in the average global surface temperature over the period 1900–2000, and about 25–35% between 1980 and 2000.[30] A paper by Peter Stott and other researchers suggests that climate models overestimate the relative effect of greenhouse gases compared to solar forcing; they also suggest that the cooling effects of volcanic dust and sulfate aerosols have been underestimated.[31] They nevertheless conclude that even with an enhanced climate sensitivity to solar forcing, most of the warming since the mid-20th century is likely attributable to the increases in greenhouse gases.

A different hypothesis is that variations in solar output, possibly amplified by cloud seeding via galactic cosmic rays, may have contributed to recent warming.[32] It suggests magnetic activity of the sun is a crucial factor which deflects cosmic rays that may influence the generation of cloud condensation nuclei and thereby affect the climate.[33]

One predicted effect of an increase in solar activity would be a warming of the stratosphere; however, the observed effect since at least 1960 has been a cooling of the lower stratosphere, which is one of the predicted results of greenhouse gas warming.[34] Reduction of stratospheric ozone also has a cooling influence, although substantial ozone depletion did not occur until the late 1970s. Solar variation combined with changes in volcanic activity probably did have a warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a cooling effect since.[1] In 2006, Peter Foukal and other researchers from the United States, Germany, and Switzerland found no net increase of solar brightness over the last thousand years. Solar cycles lead to a small increase of 0.07% in brightness over the last 30 years. This effect is far too small to contribute significantly to global warming.[35][36] A paper by Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich found no relation between global warming and solar radiation since 1985, whether through variations in solar output or variations in cosmic rays.[37] Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, the main proponents of cloud seeding by galactic cosmic rays, disputed the findings of Lockwood and Fröhlich.[38]


Temperature changes

Two millennia of mean surface temperatures according to different reconstructions, each smoothed on a decadal scale. The unsmoothed, annual value for 2004 is also plotted for reference.Main article: Temperature record

Recent
Global temperatures on both land and sea have increased by 0.75 °C (1.35 °F) relative to the period 1860–1900, according to the instrumental temperature record. This measured temperature increase is not significantly affected by the urban heat island effect. Since 1979, land temperatures have increased about twice as fast as ocean temperatures (0.25 °C per decade against 0.13 °C per decade).[39] Temperatures in the lower troposphere have increased between 0.12 and 0.22 °C (0.22 and 0.4 °F) per decade since 1979, according to satellite temperature measurements. Temperature is believed to have been relatively stable over the one or two thousand years before 1850, with possibly regional fluctuations such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.

Sea temperatures increase more slowly than those on land both because of the larger effective heat capacity of the oceans and because the ocean can lose heat by evaporation more readily than the land.[40] Since the Northern Hemisphere has more land mass than the Southern Hemisphere it warms faster; also there are extensive areas of seasonal snow cover subject to the snow-albedo feedback. Although more greenhouse gases are emitted in the Northern than Southern Hemisphere this does not contribute to the asymmetry of warming as the major gases are essentially well-mixed between hemispheres.

Based on estimates by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2005 was the warmest year since reliable, widespread instrumental measurements became available in the late 1800s, exceeding the previous record set in 1998 by a few hundredths of a degree.[41] Estimates prepared by the World Meteorological Organization and the Climatic Research Unit concluded that 2005 was the second warmest year, behind 1998.[42][43]

Anthropogenic emissions of other pollutants—notably sulfate aerosols—can exert a cooling effect by increasing the reflection of incoming sunlight. This partially accounts for the cooling seen in the temperature record in the middle of the twentieth century,[44] though the cooling may also be due in part to natural variability.

Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued that human influence on the global climate began around 8,000 years ago with the start of forest clearing to provide land for agriculture and 5,000 years ago with the start of Asian rice irrigation.[45] Ruddiman's interpretation of the historical record, with respect to the methane data, has been disputed.[46]

Pre-human climate variations

Curves of reconstructed temperature at two locations in Antarctica and a global record of variations in glacial ice volume. Today's date is on the left side of the graph.Further information: Paleoclimatology
See also: Snowball Earth
Earth has experienced warming and cooling many times in the past. The recent Antarctic EPICA ice core spans 800,000 years, including eight glacial cycles timed by orbital variations with interglacial warm periods comparable to present temperatures.[47]

A rapid buildup of greenhouse gases caused warming in the early Jurassic period (about 180 million years ago), with average temperatures rising by 5 °C (9 °F). Research by the Open University indicates that the warming caused the rate of rock weathering to increase by 400%. As such weathering locks away carbon in calcite and dolomite, CO2 levels dropped back to normal over roughly the next 150,000 years.[48][49]

Sudden releases of methane from clathrate compounds (the clathrate gun hypothesis) have been hypothesized as a cause for other warming events in the distant past, including the Permian-Triassic extinction event (about 251 million years ago) and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 million years ago).