Do you feel that humans are the main cause of global warming?

Question

Tell me what you think!!!! Do you think that we have caused most of the problems we are dealing with today?

Answer 1

I think that it is a combination of natural and human influence that has cause the problems today. Definitely the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere to 381 ppm has resulted from humans.

I think that we have increased the likelihood of our earth entering into an abrupt climate change by speeding up the process, but it is not totally our faults.

Answer 2

By humans you mean industrialization, then yes. But that's not all. By 2030 China is to surpass the US in auto emissions and to get there they are condensing 400 years of industrialization into 50. Lastly for the genius below me, tinky (or whatever his name was) Fossil Fuels are stored carbon from 400 million years plus ago. The atmosphere had much more CO2 in it thus making the earth warmer than the temperate one we enjoy today.

Answer 3

I don't "feel" it. I KNOW it. It is SCIENTIFIC FACT and anyone that disagrees is dangerously in denial.

Yes it is true that the earth's climate goes through cycles related to the sun and other factors, but the climate change we are seeing today does not fit in with the natural cycle. Yes the earth would be warming now without humans. But with us it is warming much more than it should.

Answer 4

I believe in global warming, but I do not believe humans are the cause.  It is my understanding that the amount of energy that we are receiving from the Sun is going through a cyclical increase.

Answer 5

I can not say from where the climate change originated, but we must look at all factors. We must look to the earths past and we must keep our eyes open to all possibility's. Ex. The earth magnetic field is going through a process scientist refer to as pole reversal in this process the magnetic field becomes weaker allowing harmful radiation to seep through, this radiation is normally reflected away. This radiation can cause warming of the environment and much more.  Try: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/magnetic/re...

Answer 6

No...it's the sun.  All other variations in atmospheric temp are caused by the sun (day/night, spring/summer/fall/winter)....

Answer 7

Mom said it was rude to answer a question with a question, but I have to. Were humans always present during the global warming/cooling cycles of the past several million years? Didn’t think so. Case closed.

Answer 8

Yes.  75%-95%.

This is science and what counts is the data.

"I wasn’t convinced by a person or any interest group—it was the data that got me. I was utterly convinced of this connection between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change. And I was convinced that if we didn’t do something about this, we would be in deep trouble.”

Vice Admiral Richard H. Truly, USN (Ret.)

Former NASA Administrator, Shuttle Astronaut

Here are two summaries of the mountain of peer reviewed data that convinced Admiral Truly and the vast majority of the scientific community, short and long.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Ima...

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report....

summarized at:

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

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/a...

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_...

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

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know...  Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point.  You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

Good websites for more info:

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

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sci...

http://www.realclimate.org

"climate science from climate scientists"

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

Answer 9

DUH..........

Answer 10

Yes.  There are many basic scientific facts which can only be explained if the current global warming is being caused by an increased greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from humans burning fossil fuels.

For example, the planet is warming as much or more during the night than day.  If the warming were due to the Sun, the planet should warm a lot more during the day when the Sun has influence.  Greenhouse gases trap heat all the time, so they warm the planet regardless of time of day.  Another example is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because the greenhouse gases trap the heat in the lower atmosphere.  If warming were due to the Sun, it would be warming all layers of the atmosphere.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

We know it's warming, and we've measured how much:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science...

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/62902...

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pro...

A recent study concluded:

“the range of  [Northern Hemisphere]-temperature reconstructions and natural forcing histories…constrain the natural contribution to 20th century warming to be <0.2°C [less than one-third of the total warming].  Anthropogenic forcing must account for the difference between a small natural temperature signal and the observed warming in the late 20th century.”

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104...

You can see this in the third graph here, where the dotted lines are just from natural causes, and the full lines are natural + human causes:

http://www.pnas.org/content/vol104/issue...

If that’s not enough to convince you the Sun isn’t responsible, consider the fact that no scientific study has ever attributed more than one-third of the warming over the past 30 years to the Sun, and most attribute just 0-10% to the Sun.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

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/Milankovitc...

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

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 150 times more CO2 than volcanoes annually

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man....

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...

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:Clima...

This is enough evidence to convince almost all climate scientists that humans are the primary cause of the current global warming.

Answer 11

Absolutely not, one hundred years from now, 1998 will be the maximum of the 20th century warm period. The Earth will have cooled dramatically and any nation unable to adapt will have suffered severe hardship. In the last 2000 years the Earth has experienced many rapid fluctuations in temperature, and it is absolutely clear that CO2 had no part in modulating Earths climate.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index....

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