Do you think global warming is caused by man?

Question

Do you think global warming is caused by man?

Answer 1

part of it .. yeah

Answer 2

Yes, but who really knows anyway!

Answer 3

Try to suspend your disbelief long enough to get an idea of the environmentalist world view.  I must warn you that the picture is not pretty.  If you are not aware of these issues, this essay may be disturbing.



Start with the premise that the world is finite.  The earth is a bounded sphere.  Furthermore, the biosphere is smaller than you might think.  The crust, the ocean and the atmosphere are a small portion of the earth. 90% of life is in margins of the land where it’s not too dry, too hot or too cold, in the shallow and upper portions of the ocean, in the lower portions of the atmosphere.  The atmosphere you can breathe is only a few miles thick; the entire troposphere no more than 10 miles.  You can see farther than the atmosphere is thick on a clear day.  Think about it, the biosphere doesn’t reach up and down endlessly.  In the words of the shuttle astronauts, when you see it from space, the biosphere is a thin gossamer veneer wrapped around the planet.



Taking this further, the web of life has been in a state of dynamic equilibrium since the beginning of life on earth.  Every corner of the globe is populated by exactly the right number and types of species that keeps things in balance.  Recent thinking extends this idea.  It’s possible that everything here is related and interdependent; biological processes, weather, geology, solar and astronomical cycles, even the position of our solar system within our galaxy.  Since the beginning of the earth all have influenced one another and we now have the exquisitely balanced system that allows for our existence.  However you believe this came into being; it is the objective reality to us humans and is the current unalterable state of affairs on this planet.  You cannot change the laws of physics.  You cannot violate the laws of thermodynamics.  No matter how much you or I wish it were not so, how much you believe we can somehow circumvent the limits, how much you believe someone will come and save us before its too late, every bit of objective science in existence today only reinforces the fact that we are bound to and by the environment we live in.



Taking this to the logical extreme, if you change anything at all, anywhere, you potentially disturb the balance and the outcome is not knowable with any certainty.  Would you say that this gives humanity license to change things at will?  Or would it be more prudent to wait and perhaps for example apply the great law of the Iroquois – “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact on the next seven generations”.  With our current state of knowledge our attempts to engineer the planet amount to a giant uncontrolled global experiment.



I will now continue and list some of what environmentalists consider to be the extreme, outrageous and even obscene environmental assaults that were begun in earnest at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continue to this day unabated and accelerating.  In no particular order.



Filling in estuaries to make room for human activity.  The cities we live in today were filled with waste from bank to shore in the late 19th century. The lowland areas near the rivers were considered to be wastelands and needed for commerce. First we take the prime areas and remake them for our purposes.  Estuaries are the single most important, species rich, productive and necessary habitats on the planet.  Inland, lowland areas serve the same purpose.  In North America we filled them all in 100 years ago.  The Mississippi was once miles wide.  Now it’s channeled from Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico.  Now we cut down mangrove swamps to make room for shrimp farms.  We are on our way to fishing out the oceans.  Many formerly important fisheries including species such as cod are essentially fished out.  On the current trajectory, the estimate for total collapse is 2050.  Shrimp farming is not a neutral activity that extends productivity or saves the oceans.  The shrimp have to be fed, and fed protein.  The protein comes from ocean fisheries.  But unfortunately, according to physics and thermodynamics, there are inefficiencies.  Meanwhile, when you created the shrimp farm by destroying the mangrove swamp, you have destroyed the ecosystem that once protected ocean species and helped clean and regenerate the ocean.  You would be better off just fishing the oceans in the first place to avoid all the additional losses.  So what ostensibly begins as an exercise to extend the productivity of the oceans ends up accelerating the decline.  The same is true for land based farming.  You add fertilizers and pesticides to gain productivity.  It takes energy to make chemical fertilizer and pesticides. You gain productivity in the short term, but you do so at the cost of killing the soil, despoiling the watershed and wasting energy.  You have to add more chemicals to maintain the same productivity.  Eventually the soil is dead and depleted that there is no natural fertility or resistance to runaway pathogens.  California strawberry farms essentially sterilize the soil with methyl bromide before every planting.  

How much water can we pump out of the ground before the aquifers are dry?  Evidence abounds from around the world that they are drying up now. How much waste can we dump on the ground and in the ocean before it becomes so concentrated that we end up eating the waste in our food?  We have warnings today about mercury in Tuna.  Warnings are posted on rivers and streams across the country that the fish is “unfit for human consumption”.  You have PCB, dioxin, PFOA, PBDE in your body fat (and breast milk) right now, as does every top-of-food-chain predator around the world.  How many oil spills can we have before every beach has been fouled? How much ocean dragnet trawling can we have before the entire bottom of the ocean is scraped off and there are no more fish spawning grounds.  We have been drag-netting off Cap Cod for since the early 70’s.  Once these areas have been destroyed they are not going to regenerate in our lifetime, not in 100 years or 1000 years.  These are ecosystems that were tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the making.  We exploit the Colorado so fully that it has to be desalinated at the border to make the water usable for our Mexican friends, and then it dries up in the Baja before reaching the Gulf of California.  Insert names of other rivers around the world that have been treated the same way.  How much human waste can we dump into rivers and streams and on land everywhere?  Sewage plants do not restore water to the pristine state it was in before it was pumped out of an aquifer.  Sewage treatment removes solids and fecal bacteria and breaks down detergent and some other simple contaminants.  It does nothing for the decomposition products of those reactions.  Treatment with chlorine introduces another whole class contaminates. Treatment does nothing for the thousands of other chemicals introduced from the mixing of industrial and household chemical waste with human waste.  Un-metabolized pharmaceuticals and pharmaceutical metabolites are now present in surface water all over the US.  The water pumped out of aquifers and diverted from rivers is dumped back into the environment on an unimaginable scale every minute of every day.  Huge ocean dead zones have formed at river deltas around the world, mainly due to agricultural fertilizer runoff. Plastic does not biodegrade or metabolize.  It photodegrades into tiny molecular sized pieces.  It never really goes away.  It just stays in the environment, gets ingested and kills the unlucky animal, or works its way up the food chain.  I just learned of a huge Sargasso sea of plastic in the mid pacific.  Plastic finds its way into the ocean.  Circular currents arehearding this stuff into two areas in the Pacific, where it will remain, floating forever



Frog populations around the globe are being wiped out by a mysterious fungus.  No one is sure of the origin.  The Russians have been pumping millions of gallons of highly radioactive toxic waste directly into the ground in several places in the Arctic for 30 or 40 years . North America has been logged over at least three times since the 1700’s, but we still have to go after the last virgin two percent; why?  The dominate species of trees on the east coast of the US were once Chestnut and Elm in massive forests from Tennessee to Maine.  Now they are all gone because of simple hitchhiking pests.  Now we have Oak Blight and Emerald Ash Borer. One theory for the loss of conifers in the Blue Ridge is due to constant low level foliar fertilization from nitrogen from car exhaust causing the trees to grow when they should be dormant.  How long before all trees become so stressed we lose entire forests.  Honeybee’s, on which 30-40% of the agricultural production in the US depends, are now dying from a new unknown reason called Colony Collapse Disorder. In West Virginia they are now lopping the tops off of entire mountains to get at the coal.  The tailings fill in entire valleys.  What was once an unspoiled landscape where generations of families harvested wild North American Ginseng are now featureless mounds.  And the surrounding wells produce a toxic black slurry instead of mountain spring water.  So after we have used all the coal - we will have – no mountain ecosystem, no local economy, no water, millions of tons of more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, tons of mercury in the environment and last but not least, no more coal. 2/3 of the recoverable copper on the planet has been mined.  Ozone has thinned all over the world; the “holes” are areas of greater thinning at the poles. Climate change is beginning to change temperature ranges and precipitation bands so that populations of native plants and animals are “moved” out of their native zone too quickly for them to “move” or adapt.  If food sources produce just a few days out of  

Answer 4

yes human are responsible!

here is my current answer that i would love to share

Human are responsible for polluting air and the cause of all problems are cars exhaustion and trashes everywhere.... we have to hurry up and reduce it because we don't want burnt skin over the summer which is highly dangerous now for kids to go outside in the beach and many other adults too, and because of the sun is hotter and the humid is making the temperature more active.... we have a chance of having cancer when being outside ... it's going to be at the end of the world when people will starve to death, and that IF the water is contaminated, we're not going to survive for long...

so thats why we are needing to hurry up and stop global warming or it WILL get worst and we are going to suffer...

that way we need all the SUPPORT that we can to reduce any necessary pollution!

Answer 5

Global warming is a natural phase of Earth, caused by some Solar Activities by Sun. We human don't have to bother about it. Some of the environmentalist says that this is because of the CO2 we are emitting into the environment, but the reality is that we are just contributing towards 1% to 10% of actual global warming.

If the actual cause of Global Warming is CO2 emitted by the humans then why Global Warming occures on other planets. Just Google for "Global Warming on other planets" and see the results, there are no humans on other planets.

Having too little CO2 in the environment will cause for the plants to die more early, more over it also cools down the temperature on earth.

Having too much CO2 (obiviously, not caused by humans. Mostly generated in the Sea/Oceans) will lead to Green House effect and will lead in increasing the temperature on Earth.

So, the best is to plant more trees so that there would be a balance for the consumption of CO2 on the planet.

I personally think that instead of thinking on this baseless issue try to think on what if Nuclear War broke out in the world, it will destroy Earth more rapidly.

So, next time whenever somebody says you about global warming, just ignore it.

Answer 6

Heck, I dont even thing there is global warming going on... And the interesting thing is that the data over the last couple of years backs this up.. :)

Answer 7

No

Answer 8

No.

I think it is being helped along by men and women.

Answer 9

Even if it is a combination of nature and man doing it, or if it's all nature, the fact remains that we are dumping so much c**p into the atmosphere and into our drinking water and into our oceans that it almost doesn't matter who or what is responsible.  The fact remains that we have to clean it up.  And we'd better get serious about it before it's too late.

Answer 10

uh are you serious of course it is....

Answer 11

Global warming is an essential in Life on earth. Otherwise the earth wouldn't be heated during the night.

But the growing effect it has on the temp. of earth is our own fault.

Answer 12

Right now it looks like the pendulum is swinging the other way and we are starting a cooling trend.

This has been going on forever and we are giving ourselves way to much credit if we think we can influence climate one way or the other.

Answer 13

The total amount of man made/man caused gases in greenhouse gases is .28%  Yes, that is a decimal point.  This is fact.  That means that 99.72 percent of greenhouse gases are naturally occuring.  95% of greenhouse gas is water vapor....

My latest blog explains better.  I spent months researching. I have no agenda other than finding truth.

http://christal-is-always-right.blogspot...

Answer 14

heck yeah!! What else could it be. Not to be mrnegative but we are killing our own planet.

Answer 15

Yes by cutting down trees the more CO2 same thing with driving your non high-bred car causing the ozone layer to dwindle to NOTHING letting in too much Sun rays drowning humans and killing the entire race in the end!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!