Global warming enthusiasts...?

Question

though i don't see whats to be enthusiastic about...is there any hardcore evidence that 'green-house gases' are causing global warming?

melting ice-caps dont count, they're on a rock hurtling round a star, who said they'd stay the same forever?

Answer 1

There's a mountain of evidence (some of it below), if anyone cares to actually read it.

Try this (and it's one of MANY similar studies, there are hundreds of them listed in the last reference):

Meehl, G.A., W.M. Washington, C.A. Ammann, J.M. Arblaster, T.M.L. Wigleym and C. Tebaldi (2004). "Combinations of Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings in Twentieth-Century Climate". Journal of Climate 17: 3721-3727

summarized at:

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

This answers many of the most common questions (it's 27 pages long):

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

This is the definitive study.  It's a thousand pages long, with hundreds of references to the peer reviewed literature.  Amazingly good read, too.  By the way, it won the Nobel Prize.

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

summarized at:

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

Scientists aren't just saying this because they're making it up.  There are reasons EVERY major scientific organization says this is real, and mostly caused by us.  The bottom line:

"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 and the first Commander of the Naval Space Command

Answer 2

proof the earth is warming

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/2...

proof its us

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

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

Answer 3

The problem is that to get hardcore, indisputable evidence that human CO2 emissions were causing global warming we would need to have a second "control earth" without any humans on it so we could see what happens there. We don't have that though, so it is very difficult to say 100%, definitely, for sure that humans are causing global warming and that it is not some unexplained natural phenomenon. On the flip side, it is also impossible to say definitely that human CO2 is not at least accelerating some natural warming.

Answer 4

You need to be reading more: Some of these are university level – it is science after all – but written to be understood by any educated reader.

The first two are by acknowledged world class experts in atmospheric and oceanic science and global geochemical cycles.

What We Know About Climate Change by Professor K. Emanuel (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/About-Climate-Ch...

Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast by Professor D. Archer (University of Chicago)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Global-Warming-U...

Climate Change: A Multidisciplinary Approach

By W.J. Burroughs

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Climate-Change-W...

Chpt 8 is particularly good on past climate changes and causes.

Given their prominence it’s also worth reading what the IPCC actually say.

Climate Change 2007 - The Physical Science Basis: Working Group I Contribution to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Climate-Change-2...

Also good on the history of the science is ‘The Discovery of Global Warming’ by S.R. Weart.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Discovery-Warmin...

My local library service (UK) buys books for its shelves based partly on readers’ requests. It’s worth asking yours for these titles, if they haven’ got them they could try the interlibrary loan service, if that isn’t feasible then they may buy them.

Answer 5

Masses and masses of evidence.....

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs...

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/2...

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

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

Answer 6

there is no proof, it's just a theory, and we' aren't warming any more, we are likely to cool now. The IPCC leave out stuff they don't want us to know and add lots of rubbish. check out http://www.iceagenow.com

Answer 7

Yes, there's tons of evidence on the internet.

Answer 8

There's a great deal of evidence that greenhouse gases warm the planet, and a great deal of evidence that an enhanced greenhouse effect is responsible for the bulk of 20th century warming.

First, scientists can measure what Earth's temperature would be without any atmospheric absorption (without a greenhouse effect), and they've measured that it would be about 33º colder than Earth is now. Scientists have learned that this extra warmth is coming from the atmosphere. Also, scientists can measure the radiative properties of different gases under controlled conditions in laboratory experiments. They've learned that certain gases are transparent to shortwave radiation (sunlight), and opaque to longwave radiation (heat from Earth's surface). Many of these gases are present in the atmosphere, so a greenhouse effect must exist.

Second, all the "fingerprints" of 20th century warming point to an enhanced greenhouse effect as the cause. For example, more warming is occurring at night than during the day (which makes no sense if the warming is caused by changes in insolation). And the warming has resulted in a cooling in the stratosphere-Earth's upper atmosphere, which results from greenhouse warming but, again, is unexplainable by solar warming.

Of course, this is only a tiny bit of the mountain of evidence supporting anthropogenic global warming theory. For more information I recommend reading the IPPC AR4 report, which you can read for free in the link given below.

Answer 9

It's not man that is causing any warming.  There is a mountain of evidence that shows a link between the Sun and the Earths temperatures.

"Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet's recent climate changes have a natural—and not a human-induced"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...

Answer 10

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

Greenhouse gases are part of this planets way to stay warm and they are a good thing and yes they "help" keep the planet warm enough for all of us to live here.  However, the unproven theory is that C02 alone produced by humans is going to be the cause of an exponential increase in temperature, receding coastlines and the earth's destruction.

C02 is only one of the many greenhouse gases that contribute to the planets heat protection.  Water Vapor, Methane, Carbon Dioxide, Nitrous Oxide and Ozone are all part of the greenhouse phenomenon.  They all contribute in one way or another to keeping the solar heat on our planet so we and other species may live.

The problem with this extremist view of the greenhouse effect is that it is using computer models that they are finding aren't very good at prognosticating weather and climate.  

Go to any universities science department website and search for papers and conference talks and you will find countless papers and powerpoint presentations about how these researchers are trying to decrease the variance in this or that computer model and actual observations.  Quite a bit of research is in this category which should give you a clue about how unreliable these computer models can be.  These computer models are being used as evidence of global warming and the predictions for the "sky is falling" mentality.

Computer models can only spit out information based upon what we put in them.  So if we see a rise in C02 and a rise in temperature do we automatically jump and say that the more C02 we put in our atmosphere the warmer and warmer it will get?  According to some politicians this is enough evidence for them.  However, I think 30 years...heck even 100 years out of 4.5 billion does not a scientific study make.  That and there is evidence in fossil record and ice core samples to show that C02 flucuates in large swings when we weren't even around and that the C02 increases happen after warming.  

Could it be then that there is some other mechanism or several other mechanisms that cause the planet to warm?

I think that should still be up for debate and so do quite a few scientists, but politicians say no.  I don't think that I will be paying attention to the political rhetoric in this case, I will continue to view and discuss actual scientific study thank you very much.