Are the effects of greenhouse gases a myth?

Question

Are the effects of greenhouse gases a myth?

Answer 1

Absolutely a myth.  Mt. Saint Helens did more damage to the environment and the atmosphere than man could do in our lifetime and that area is beginning to thrive with life again. Greenhouse gasses.  I don't think so.

Answer 2

No.  But separating their effects from other causes is not as easy as many would have us believe.  very complicated issue.

EDIT:  I despise people that explain contrary views as deriving from self-serving purpose-they don't like the arguments and thus say they must come from people that have an underlying motive unrelated to finding the truth.  Can't beat the facts, so call them names.  Good move.

Answer 3

No...it's common sense...

Fill the atmosphere up with smoke...

And the surface of the earth can't radiate as much heat back into space, and thus...

We get "Global Warming..."

Very simple science fact...

Answer 4

nope

Answer 5

Sure is a myth. If you could read last Friday's Australian Newspaper you willl see a great story written by Professor David Evans saying what a lot of bull sh** this is. It's  a very interesting story.

Google David Evans - No smoking hot spots.

Answer 6

not at all. if it weren't for the greenhouse effect in total, the earth would be at 0 degrees fahrenheit, because that's the amount of heat that we get from the sun; but thanks to the  greenhouse effect it keeps the average temp at 60 degrees fahrenheit. that's old, well established science. anybody who disagrees with that is not worth listening to.

so, we know what the gases are that do this; not oxygen, and not nitrogen. they are carbon dioxide, methane, water, and some others like nitrogen oxides, freon, etc. water vapor is the most because there's the most of it, but pound for pound it isn't as strong as methane or carbon dioxide. however, the amount of water vapor also depends on the temperature, so you can't just count it as a constant factor, it tends to amplify whatever effect is going on.

which brings us to carbon dioxide; we've been measuring carbon dioxide in the air for a couple of centuries; it used to be pretty unchanging, but we've added about 1/3 more carbon dioxide to the air in the past 100 years, most of it the past 50 years, most of that in the past 20 years, etc. because of burning fossil carbon in the form of  coal and petroleum. that's a 30% increase, not the "tiny increase" global warming deniers always claim. and we know this several ways; we know about how much carbon we've burned total, and it's about twice as much as has been added to the atmosphere, we figure the rest is dissolving in the ocean. we can tell the new carbon dioxide in the air is from fossil carbon not current plants, etc. because of good old carbon dating. we know it's not coming out of volcanoes, because the oxygen in the air is going down by the same amount the carbon dioxide is going up. and as the temp goes up, the water vapor increases as the oceans evaporate, which makes the effect even greater.

it's like a blanket; the general greenhouse effect is like a blanket around the earth that raises the temp 60 degrees; if you add even a thinner blanket to that, you're still going to raise the temp another couple of degrees. might not be much compared to the 60 degrees the main effect gives us, but it's not nothing. and we keep pumping more carbon dioxide out, like piling more and more blankets on.

or, look at it another way, if you don't believe it's "naturally possible"; for most of the earth's history, there was much more carbon dioxide in the air than now, and it was about ten degrees hotter, and much wetter. kind of like those bad  movies of prehistoric times, except ther were no animals on the land. people wouldn't like it, trust me. then the prehistoric  plants discovered photosynthesis, and spent 100 million years during the carboniferous era converting that carbon dioxide into plant tissue, so fast that when they died it couldn't even rot back into carbon dioxide, it just got buried. and that's our coal and petroleum. that's what carboniferous means, after all. at the end of 100 million years, the carbon dioxide level was like it is now, at least before we started digging the carbon up and burning it, and the temperature and humidity was like it is now. and that's the conditions under which every animal except the most ancient primitive fish evolved, including us, and under which all the modern plants evolved. so now we're taking that 100 million years of carbon out from underground and putting most of it back into the air, only not over 100 million years, instead over a couple of centuries. and we're supposed to believe that that probably won't knock the climate back to the way it was? why in the world wouldn't it?

on the other side, the global warming deniers got nothing. half of them say it isn't warming, the other half explain to you why it is warming. in any other subject, those two positions wouldn't be considered to agree. all the reasons why it's supposed to be warming don't hold water; the sun isn't heating up, we measure it all the time. mars is heating up, but there's another 7 to 11 planets in the solar system, depending on how you count planets, which aren't, so that argument that it's the sun doesn't make sense. our next door neighbor the moon isn't warming at all, so how is it the sun? then they argue that it's the sun's magnetic field, which is affecting the cosmic rays, which affects the clouds, which affects the amount of sunshine; and this completely handwaving idea is supposed to be more believable than the well known behavior of greenhouse gases, despite there being only the tiniest sketchiest evidence that this cosmic ray thing might even be possible at all. then we get the complaint that "it's just modeling" when in fact everything done in modern science is "just modeling" whether it's the effect of a drug on cell biochemistry or the strength of the metal in the piston of a car engine. meanwhile,  despite the claim that "models can show anything you want them to", nobody ever comes up with a model of the climate that doesn't have greenhouse effect it in that remotely resembles the real climate. so we're left with the two big arguments against greenhouse effect warming: 1) "i don't believe it,  still" and 2) "well it might be something else we don't know about". yeah, that's great, science really marches on when you call those legitimate arguments. "energy is conserved?" "i don't believe it, still" "the planets' orbits are determined by gravity?" "well it might be something else we don't know about"

which is a good time to point out that most of these arguments "the science isn't all in yet","scientists don't all agree", "it hasn't been scientifically proved" "it's just the d**n socialists trying to run your lives" are the exact same arguments used by the smoking-causes-cancer deniers not so long ago; and in fact by the same organizations (TASSC) and the same people (pat michaels) only paid for by tobacco companies then, and oil companies now. those arguments don't mean anything, they're just general dumbass denial and can be applied to anything.