Anything/Everything about Global warming? Green House effect?

Question

I'm doing a report on Gobal warming, green house effect - ozone deptetion, and also, immunity but I'm alright on that one but if you have anything.. ... it would EXTREMELY helpful for any informative websites that you know.. thanks

Answer 1

Some gases ("greenhouse gases") let sunlight in, which warms the Earth, and then block that heat from leaving. That's the "greenhouse effect", and it's a natural thing, mostly caused by water vapor.

Man is making excessive amounts of greenhouse gases, mostly by burning fossil fuels. That causes the delicate natural balance to go out of whack and the Earth warms. That's global warming.

It won't be a Hollywood movie style disaster. Gradually coastal areas will flood and agriculture will be damaged. But it will be very bad. Rich countries will cope, but it will take huge amounts of money. In poor countries many people will die of starvation, but not all of them.

Most scientists say, in 20-50 years. But we need to start right now to fix it, fixing it will take even longer than that.

Really good website for more information here:

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.a...

Lots of numerical scientific data proving it real here:

http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report...

Proof that most scientists think it's real and mostly caused by us here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/fu...

Answer 2

Its a lie.

Answer 3

As we all learned in school, the last ice age ended about 12,000 years ago and the Earth has been warming (on average) ever since.  

Before man ever became industrialized, the glaciers were melted back over a thousand miles, uncovering millions of acres of new land for forests and animals to grow.  New York, which was covered by a mile of solid, deadly ice, is now a green and thriving ecosystem thanks to global warming.  Same for Canada.

We know that CO2 cannot be the cause, since the decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw a great global cooling, inspiring scientists to warn us of a coming ice age - even as industry pumped more and more CO2 into the air.

We also know that the sun's changing output is responsible for the warming and cooling cycles.

We know that the Weather Channel creator is angry at all the lies from Al Gore and his flunkies.

Answer 4

Most school assignments will want you to use trustworthy sites (not personal blogs, op-ed pieces, or non-scientific sources).  So I'd suggest you stick to sites ending with .edu or .gov

Here are a few good ones to start with:

The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Global Warming FAQs

http://www.ucar.edu/news/features/climat...



Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale Global Warming FAQ

http://earth.geology.yale.edu/~sherwood/...



NOAA Global Warming FAQ

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/glob...

The 2008 National Academy of Sciences Summary Brochure on Climate Change

http://dels.nas.edu/dels/rpt_briefs/clim...

Answer 5

Here's a good FAQ on the science:

Frequently Asked Questions from Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. ...

http://www.gcrio.org/ipcc/ar4/wg1/faq/in...

Although some people seem to be lulled into a false sense of security by the PR slogan "the climate has changed naturally in the past", the evidence of past climate change associated with CO2 increases confirms that we can't take the risk lightly:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

It was less reassuring to notice what the climate had looked like in certain ancient times when CO2 had stood at a high level... a level that humanity would eventually reach if we went on burning all available oil and coal. The Earth had been virtually a different planet, with tropical forests near the poles and sea levels a hundred meters higher. Worse, as one group pointed out, unchecked emissions seemed bound to bring not only "a warming unprecedented in the past million years," but changes "much faster than previously experienced by natural ecosystems..."(57)

There are dozens of scientific papers that indicate that climate change is linked to greenhouse gas increases:

Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v44...

"A firm understanding of the relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and temperature is critical for interpreting past climate change and for predicting future climate change1. A recent synthesis2 suggests that the increase in global-mean surface temperature in response to a doubling of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, termed 'climate sensitivity', is between 1.5 and 6.2 °C..."

And the latest research has confirmed warming at unprecedented rates:

New Research Confirms Antarctic Thaw Fears - Spiegel Online

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk...

"...the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers have only lost 2.3 centimeters of their thickness annually during the past 14,500 years. Satellite measurements taken between 1992 and 1996, though, show a loss of 1.6 meters in thickness per year on the Pine Island Glacier -- a figure that represents 42 times the average melt of the past 4,700 years."

Indications are that the process is occuring at a rate at the high end of the range of forecasts.  Our food supplies (and prices) are already being affected:

Food News

http://www.climatechangenews.org/nFood.h...