Even if Global Warming is a natural phenomenon, should we try to stop it?

Question

There are many questions posted about global warming and whether we believe in it or not.

I personally think there is evidence that we contribute to it, but the atmosphere and its interaction with the earth's crust is a complex system - and certainly natural phenomena can contribute to the effect.

So the question is - assume it is not manmade - should we still try to keep our planet habitable or not?

Answer 1

What makes you think man can stop a natural cycle?

Can we stop the water cycle? Plate tectonics? Tides? Earthquakes? Storms?

No. We cannot stop any of those things. So why would global warming be any different?

Man is too arrogant.

Answer 2

The problem is people don't like change, even if it is completely natural.  Like a river near my house, they use a chain ling fence to keep the river from naturally changing its course.  Its the same way with the natural phenomenon of global worming, they don't want the world as we know it to change.  So if you don't want change, do some thing about it.

Answer 3

Try reading this.  I think you will learn quite a bit about the other side of what you now believe:

AL'S WARMING LIES

& THE REAL 'INCONVENIENT TRUTH'

By IAIN MURRAY

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March 22, 2007 -- AL Gore was born and spent most of his life in Washington, D.C. Yesterday, he returned to the fever swamp to show he's forgotten none of his old political tricks.

Addressing the House and Senate on global warming, he put forth a litany of half-truths that he twisted into a morality tale. But the facts tell a different story. The former veep is a master politician, not a prophet or a planetary savior.

Gore's biggest rhetorical trick is saying that the Earth has a fever. He says that 10 of the hottest years in history came in the last 11 years, and this proves we must do something, because, "If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor."

This is meaningless. The Earth has been much, much hotter in the past than today. No giant space nanny fed it medicine.

Moreover, a healthy baby has a constant temperature - that's why a fever is bad. The Earth does not have a constant temperature. It has been generally warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, but that has not been uniform. It's had warming phases (the 1920s and 1930) and cooling phases (the 1940s to 1970s).

It's also had periods like today, when temperatures are flat - there hasn't been much warming since 1998. Yes, it's warmer today than it was a hundred years ago, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Talking about fevers is misleading, but it's a great rhetorical trick.

And when it comes to the economics of the issue, Gore is way outside the mainstream. Appearing before a House committee, he said that changing the American economy in the way he proposes - a plan of freezes, taxes, market controls and regulations that would represent a massive expansion of government control over the economy - would not be costly.

Yet he also endorsed the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol (which he helped negotiate). The U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates that Kyoto would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $100 billion to $400 billion a year.

Gore is a very wealthy man, but it's hard to see why he can't recognize that this is a lot of money lost - and a lot of jobs lost and a lot of families going cold and hungry.

How does Gore address this point? He doesn't; he simply avoids it, with highfalutin rhetoric. It's not just the Earth's "fever" and our supposed moral duty to cure it; he says our descendants will either condemn us as blind or praise us for our moral courage. He also makes veiled references to himself as Churchill, while all around him others appease fascism.

It's not subtle stuff - nor accurate.

If you establish that the Earth is warming, it doesn't necessarily follow that we have a moral duty to reduce emissions. What should follow is an informed debate about the costs and benefits of various policies to address that warming - reducing emissions is just one possible answer. Another debate should focus on those policies' economic costs.

Al Gore doesn't want to have those debates, because the majority of evidence suggests that emissions reduction will be very costly and will have little effect. Kyoto, fully enacted by all its parties, would for all its cost reduce global warming by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050 - a barely detectable amount.

Meanwhile, 2 billion people around the world go without electricity. About 3 million die each year because of fumes given off by primitive stoves. The U.S. economy sneezes when gasoline hits $3 a gallon.

If we have a moral duty, it's to keep energy affordable here and to expand access to it overseas. That's the real moral truth, however inconvenient for Al Gore.

Iain Murray is senior fellow in Energy, Science and Technology at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

Answer 4

Well, my two cents.  If we make an effort to do something, under the assumption that maybe we are causing it, that means expenditures and changes.  I have heard many people say that we should act whether or not we are the source of the problem because the climate change will be bad, and there is nothing to lose by acting.

However, as the recent ethanol-food price crisis indicates, making policy changes and spending money can have unanticipated (or at least unpublicised beforehand) adverse impacts.  So ANY changes in policy or the way we do things should be well thought through before starting.  Don't act to fix something that ain't broke, as they say.

This doesn't mean that we cannot act to address more clearly defined environmental problems.  Improving energy efficiency, for example, would benefit any possible human-induced aspect of climate change (if it exists) while at the same time benefiting air and water quality, and improving the economy by weaning us from OIL.

I personally do not believe that man has much, if any, impact on global temperatures, but I also believe that there are a lot of areas where we could make modifications to improve quality of life and quality of the environment, and really, our economic circumstances.

Sending huge portions of our economic output to countries of questionable social and political attitude seems a poor idea to me.  It's like the old drug addict analogy.

We SHOULD try to keep the planet habitable.  In my view that is completely unrelated to "global warming" (I refuse to call it climate change because, as my 1973 intro geo textbook stated "climate, by its very nature, is always changing" and I see no point in unnecessary redundancy).

Answer 5

Yes... let's blow up the sun.... you greenies are hilarious.

Answer 6

We have certainly contributed to the global warming problem through our technological advances: automobiles, air conditioners (major contributor to global warming here in the US which is why we're at the top of the list of greenhouse gas producers), air pollution, CFC's and other toxic agents etc. We have been contributing to global warming since the Industrial Revolution. But, we are just part of the problem. Global warming is a natural occurrence, but it is through our technological advances that we have made the problem worse. Yes, we should do what we can to slow down global warming for the sake of both nature and man-kind. Global warming affects all of us. It is important that people take care of our home. After all, no one wants to have yet worse hurricanes, tornados and other wild weather. What we have now is bad enough.

Answer 7

once u try to fix a lie u r a living lie

Answer 8

Ok, if it's natural, we have NO impact on it.  None.  Nothing we do will alter it.  Might as well pray about it day and night, for whatever good that'll do.  I'll simply adapt to the 1 or 2 degree difference I'll see over my lifetime, teach my kids to wear sunscreen and avoid purchasing land on the coast.

Answer 9

It does not matter whether it is man made or not. The fact of the matter is, is that the earth will survive, it always does; Humans will die. So if there are things we can do to prevent things from happening, we should be putting our all into it.

Answer 10

Yellowstone National Park is a good example of what happens when we try to control nature.

We wanted to see beautiful herds of elk, so we killed off the wolves.  The elk population got so large that they started to destroy the trees and grass lands, so we've had to reintroduce wolves.

We also wanted to see pristine forest, so we didn't do any controlled burns or clearing of underbrush, and due to that the whole park burned down in the 1980's.

We should just learn our lesson and let nature do what nature does.

Also, the earlier periods of global warming have been when our species has been the most successful.  So I don't think it is really as big a deal as everyone makes it out to be.

As with everything else in nature, we should learn how to adapt to it, not how to change it.

Answer 11

I'm curious how it'll turn out, so let's just wait and see.

Answer 12

yes.

Answer 13

" should we still try to keep our planet habitable or not?"

Warmer is more habitable than cooler.

Who is "we"??  If YOU want to make it cooler, what if I don't go along with the plan?

Answer 14

ya we should because i don't want another ice age and it can happen fast like back in 1500-1700 in Europe when there was a mini ice age that killed many crops. Also look at the heat wave in Europe that killed thousands of people.

Answer 15

We should not try to stop it. Number on, because we can not, number two, it is more beneficial than harmful to us.

Answer 16

no.  who gives a ****

Answer 17

We need help here in California from the earth quacks also.

Answer 18

Yes we should or our environment will be in danger.

Answer 19

I think that as long as we continue to use our resources reasonably, then we shouldn't act in any way that might interfere with natural geologic processes.

Answer 20

IF Global warming were still happening, it would be much more habitable than global cooling

Answer 21

Habitable? How does a few degrees make it uninhabitable.  A few degrees cooler did cause large scale famine when the sun was in a cooler cycle a few hundred years ago.  A few degrees warmer from increased CO2 means greater crop yields, longer growing seasons and increased efficiency of photosynthesis.

Answer 22

I'm so sorry

Answer 23

Fanatics have bypassed nature and went right to the THEORY that man causes everything.  I am surprised that earthquakes aren't blamed on man as well....  But I guess that's coming next.