Global warming: Myth or reality?

Question

I personally believe it's real and that it's happening NOW. People the proof is right in front of you! It's real! Look at the facts! The dramatic change in weather, the melting of the ice caps! It's real, it's happening and the children of the future are going to see the extent of our carelessness.

That's my opinion. What's yours?

Answer 1

"Dramatic change in weather"?  Are you talking about the recent record cold?  If that is the proof right in front of me, then I am going to have a hard time believing in global warming.

Suppose AGW is real (which it's not).  The children of the future are going to suffer through extended growing seasons and larger growing areas which translates into more food worldwide.  All of the predictions of imminent doom haven't occurred and aren't going to.

Do you realize how much the Earth has warmed in the last century?  0.7 C.  That's all.  Not even 1 degree C.  Do you really believe that is a problem?  Do you really believe the balance of the planet is about to tip into a burning pit of fire due to 0.7 C rise in temperature?  Please stop drinking the kool-aid and do some reading for yourself.

Answer 2

Read Revelations in the bible it says thats one of the seals to be broken there ain't nothing we can do about it its gonna happen.

Answer 3

There are two views and i am completely ambivolent on this issues. First, that Global Warming is actually happening as a result of human pollution. Second, no that naturally the Earth's climate changes every 200 years or so and that it is normal. The Earth changes it's climate every so often, and that's the view i lean more towards. Unfortunatly, global warming, like all issues of this world, creates a lot of money, therefore, it might be a scare tactic for a long time as it creates money and popularity. Just look at the politicians and the stars who are in center stage when they oppose or agree with global warming and how much money they make. Ex. Al Gore would not be as rich if he hadn't have jumped on the bandwagon.

Answer 4

reality.  i've always heard about it growing up (all the warnings), but after watching inconvenient truth and keeping up with enviromental studies and news sources, it's opened my eyes up alot more.

Answer 5

Well did you also hear the theory of global cooling? After hearing that. . I thing al gore is full of it. All those chemicals they are finding in the atmosphere could have come from anywhere. Plus, so you know why Greenland is called greenland? Because it used to be warm and had fertile soil! Does that sound like melting or cooling to you?

Answer 6

ABSOLUTELY REALITY!!! i think that we need to take better care of this planet or else it will chew us up and spit us out! check out a movie called "An Inconvenient Truth"... it explains it all there. its with Al Gore (whether u like him or not is besides the point. lol.)..... my generation is gonna have to figure out how to fix this problem when we get older!

Answer 7

yes global warming is a fact. da icecaps and glaciers which were present a few years are now missing. the climate is not steady as before. All this is due 2 global warming. and it is proven

Answer 8

Global warming is fact. Another FACT, most people dont know what it means. The term global warming may sound like the world is getting "warmer" but in fact the meaning is, and always has been "global climate change". It means places that get hot are cooling down, places that are cold are getting warmer. Dry areas turning more humid. humid places getting dryer. This may sound like its not a big deal, but as these climates change, so are the habitats and environments of alot of different types of flora and fauna. Plants and animals are going to go extinct or need to migrate to areas where they can survive. Where are they going to go, into the city???

Fossil fuels take millions of years to create. MILLIONS. In the last 100 - 150 years we have almost exhausted the earths supply of fossil fuels. With all that exhaust and waste getting pumped into the air, we are causeing this "natural" climate change to happen more rapidly. The earths forests have a way of cleansing the air, they inhale CO2, and exhale Oxygen, thus "recylcling" the air for all of us to breath. With the destruction of many of our forests and tropical rain forests, there are less trees to take in all this CO2, and we have now reached a saturation point, so the CO2 isnt being recycled anymore. Its just hanging around in the atmosphere.

Look, i know most people for some reason dont believe in global warming, and cannot believe we perfect humans have nothing to do with it. Look at the facts, we are polluting, clear cutting, destroying, over populating. The earth works in perfect balance, and we are throwing it off.

Answer 9

I used to think it was real until I went to rehab and got a job.

Answer 10

reality

Answer 11

idk, but we know what things will be like when judgement day is here. global warming would be the last thing to worry about then

Answer 12

My opinion is that it has been too frickin' cold for the last two winters for anyone to convince me that the Earth is turning into a fireball.  Inventors of the internet included.

Answer 13

I think its real-but i dont buy into the worst-case scenarios  that the Al Gores of the world want to cram down our throats.

I live in Ohio. We have had very cold and long winters the past few years. Longer and colder than  usual. Global warming? I wish it would warm this place up some.

Answer 14

Its real!!!

Answer 15

I think you and everyone else who suspects and predicts global warming are on to something.  Global warming is definately happening.  I once read this article in Time magazine about how countries such as U.S and Russia are waiting for the icecaps to melt so that they could get first dibs on untouched oil.  This is sad!

Answer 16

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 17

I believe climate change, one of its aspect being global warming, is a reality. However, a lot of the public is misinformed by scientifically inaccurate statements made by documentaries such as An Inconvenient Truth.

ie. When the the movie claims that the melted ice will cause a 20 feet increase in sea level in 100 years. However, the truth is the seas will only rise 20 inches or less within a hundred years. It'll take at least a thousand years at the current rate for the seas to rise 20 feet.

So climate change/global warming is a problem, but so is fear monger.

Answer 18

The world is always warming or cooling...

I believe the arctic is shrinking and the antarctic is growing...

Most of the US used to be covered by glaciers...

What is global warming exactly? Is it human contribution to temperature increases? How is the temperature measured: on the ground? in 3.2 feet in the air? 10 feet below the surface of the  ocean? 100 feet? And what's the correct temperature?

Why is there such a fixation on carbon dioxide when historical records (including those in AlGore's movie) show that temperature increases precede carbon dioxide increases by hundreds of years?

I believe water vapor is the "greenhouse gas" that influences temperature the greatest so should we ban hybrid cars since they produce water vapor?

Answer 19

Actually, scientists are now proving that in fact the world is getting cooler and there has not been much significant heating for it to be "global warming". And humans only account for less than 1% of global warming, so we're not really contributing at all. Research on it.

Answer 20

I believe it's real as well. But, I am not sure if the repercussions are going to be as extreme as expressed in Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth"

Answer 21

Reality.

People who claim that it isn't:

1) Haven't paid attention to the clear evidence:

http://www.climatechangenews.org/nCanari...

2) Don't understand that it is starting to affect their food costs today, and may affect availability of food for them in the near future:

http://www.climatechangenews.org/nFood.h...

3) Don't understand that the current summaries such as the IPCC reports seriously underestimate the magnitude of the warming:

http://www.barentsobserver.com/hottest-a...

"This winter might become the mildest winter in Northern Norway ever registered. So far the average temperature in parts of the region has been up to eight degrees Celsius above the normal."

4) Don't understand that the rate of warming is not consistent with past natural warming:

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk...

"The paper also states that the thickness of the Pine Island Glacier has shrunk by an average of 3.8 centimeters annually over the past 4,700 years. But the Smith and Pope glaciers have only lost 2.3 centimeters of their thickness annually during the past 14,500 years. Satellite measurements taken between 1992 and 1996, though, show a loss of 1.6 meters in thickness per year on the Pine Island Glacier -- a figure that represents 42 times the average melt of the past 4,700 years."