Does somebody have conclusive evidence that the global warming phenomanon isn't merely a natural progression?

Question

By this I mean a natural progression of normal events stemming from the last ice age 10,000 years ago? It has been shown that after each of the glaciations the Earth warming was responsible for causing the ice to retreat. The one thing we don't know is how long this cooling/warming cycle takes for sure. Could we still be feeling the effects of the ending portion of the most recent glaciation?

Answer 1

http://climate.weather.com/science/urban...

Answer 2

Only within my tiny apartment.  Here I experience man-made global warming on a local scale...real local.  I'll try to keep the door closed.

;)

Answer 3

There is no conclusive evidence that the current cycle of global warming is not natural....PERIOD!

Answer 4

not really...acording to geoligisists,who have been studying the ground for evidence of the ice age, have found out that they happen on a regular basis and that we should be atually be at the start of an ice age now yet,the climate is getting warmer. one explanation could be climate change.

Answer 5

The average increase in temperatures the past hundred years has been about 0.7 C degrees on a global scale. Some places more and some less.

What would the temperature have been if this was the "natural" increase after an ice age? Well, 0.7 C every 100 year would make 70 C in a time span of 10 000 year. The difference between ice age and interglacial periods are between 5-10 degrees, so I don't find it likely that this is due to those "normal" changes.

For further information on how climate today is compared to pre-historic climate I can recommend this site from noaa:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwar...

Hope this helped.

Answer 6

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 7

Man is not causing climate change.  Co2 has increased in our air just 100ppm (parts per million) in the last 100 years.  That's just one molecule per million per year.  

This isn't enough to make any difference.

The climate has warmed slightly.  This does not mean that it will continue to warm in the future.  No one can foresee the future.

The Sun is the source for all of Earth's warmth, and the output of the Sun is never constant.  Slight variations of the Sun's temperature has a great impact on the change of temperature on the Earth.

Scientist are not looking at the Sun to explain climate change, as they have determined than man is far too insignificant to cause any change to the climate.

Answer 8

Does somebody have conclusive evidence that the global warming phenomenon isn't merely a natural progression?

Yes, primarily because if there were no human beings on earth global warming would still occur!   Global warming has come and gone thousands of times in our earth's past - what we are presently going through is just another phase!

If there were no humans on earth global warming would still happen!