Global warming is it a fact or just a news story ?

Question

Global warming is it a fact or just a news story ?

Answer 1

Its just a news story. The earth's temperature has natuarly raised and lowered throught the millions of years the earth has existed. We saw an increase in temperature and jumped to the conclusion that we caused. We made hasty genralization that very well may not be true.

Answer 2

Global climate is a dynamic process, and as such, is always in a state of change, either getting warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, regardless of humans.

The degree of warming and the contribution of human activity have been grossly exaggerated for a variety of political reasons.

Carbon dioxide is only one very small part of a very complex system, but governments and activists see the global warming issue as a useful tool to advance their various political agendas. Governments see it as a blame free way of increasing taxes, while the left see it as anti-capitalist propaganda.

We should use our resources wisely and clean up after ourselves, but this scapegoating of carbon dioxide is nonsense, as it is a natural and vital component of our atmosphere, without it there would be no life at all on this planet

Answer 3

That the temperature is rising is indeed a fact. The debate is whether or not we are the cause of the temperature increase.

Answer 4

It is certainly a buzzphrase :-) but to answer the question, it is a meme. In fact it is today's Piltdown man.

Answer 5

news story..is not made until there's some or the other thing behind it....

n when we say global warming...our eyes which can see on which path the world is leading....n how the things have a adverse effect on world....as in coz..of the main reason population...other things can come below it......

Answer 6

Its a good scare story put about so governments can s***w more tax from everyone, and allows morons like Al Gore to jump on an oportunistic band wagon. What the h**l use is he anyhow! Todays conditions were predicted in the 1960s but todays so called experts have conveniently forgotten that in their haste for fame. Its natural.

Answer 7

Are you kidding me?

Answer 8

As you can see and hear global warming is true. The weather is getting extreme. More hurricanes happened in the last and this decade. In some countries the weather is getting hotter and drier such as Australia. The global tempreture had increased in recent years. This indicates that global warming is true.

Answer 9

it's obviously real they've got facts proving it dont u watch the news :-) apparently not

Answer 10

Start looking for facts,like when is this going to happen . In NASA we measured everything , so measure the CO2 and see how good of a job the plants are doing.

Answer 11

Well ... we THINK the planet is warming and some think it is man made and some think it is part of a natural cycle. The jury is out but there are strong opinions from both camps. There is also allot of misinformation out there.

xxFJ

Answer 12

Global Warming is a fact and a news story.

The earth is warming up, the polar caps are melting, sea levels will rise, and we can expect tons of cases of extreme weather, drought, floods etc. and we are in trouble... how much trouble is still in debate (!)

But it is also a story, it is newsworthy, we are being taken for a ride in many cases, it is gonna be used as a way of getting more tax out of us, and global warming, like all disasters, will be manipulated by certain governments for personal and political strength, etc.

Either way its not good news and shouldnt be ignored, but we should be vigilant in what we read and who we listen to.

Three years ago when the elections came up, i hardly heard anybody mention global warming or the environment in any of their speeches, now its on peoples minds politicians have jumped onto it for the sake of popularity.. it remains to be seen who will actually do something good.

But no matter what governments do, its up to us to make our mark ourselves, not wait for others.

Answer 13

Facts from scientists indicate that places, glaciers, etc that should be cold, are now melting.  They claim it is because of what mankind is putting into the atmosphere.  However, I have read, years ago, the earth was much hotter and there was no factories, cars, people around to blame it on.  

Your guess is as good as mine.

Answer 14

Since there hasn't been further warming since 1998, I would say it's a news story.

Global warming should take the headlines until we get close to 2012.

Many people believe 2012 the world is going to end.

Answer 15

Believe it or not we are actually still in an iceage, this is not a well know fact, and yes there have been may times that the earth has been without ice, and also the ice packs and fields, have grown and shrunk during many iceages.

without going mad on facts and figures, the reason that it is now widely belived the the loss of ice over vast areas around the world is due to global warming and not natural warming is, the rapid rate of which the mean tempratures has risen since the start of the industrial revolution. prior to this time it was a very slow if not only slightly fluctating temprature, if you look at a chart now with avarage mean tempratures  of to day it is a very steep climb way beyond normal, and is increasing over the years. Yes the tempratures have also been a lot warmer than into days climate, but in years past it was a gradual increase of thousands, if not millions of years, giving time for nature to adapt to the increases. Today the increase is running at anexpidential rate animals, plants etc are not able to adapt at the speed it is changing. take the polar bears, the pack ice as of the last 20 years where they hunt has decreased by a substantial amounts, pushing the solitary animal closer together, its harder for them to hunt, they are unable to hunt for the limited amount of food on the decreasing pack ice, and if it continuse to disapear at the rate it is, they are so finally adapted to this area, they will not have time to evolve with the environment.

Answer 16

And facts and news stories are mutually exclusive right?

Answer 17

I think it is a fact because if you type it in on say google or youtube it will show science clips of how glbal warming is started!!!

Answer 18

I work in the Shetland Islands, No global warming up there!

Answer 19

Is our weather less consistant than it was 20 years ago, if so then I would suggest there is something afoot.

Answer 20

fact.

Answer 21

It is just a news story - there is no evidence that ther earth is warming up, it's just a story.  The hottest time on earth was back in the 1350's......!  Also, there is no hole in the ozone layer, it's just the polar vortex.  How could there be a hole in the artic region anyway??  There are not many cars or other stuff that "polutes" the envirnment.  Your best bet is to stay out of an argument where nobody knows what they are talking about!

Answer 22

Global warming is a fact.  The mean temperature of the earth has risen considerably since the industrial revolution (in the area of 3-4 degrees - not one half a degree as some have suggested).

The question is whether or not this increase is a natural phenomenom or if it's man made.

Global warming is also a news story.  With both sides taking such inflexible positions it naturally makes for great news.  Any time both sides of a political debate start calling each other names, it sells.

Answer 23

Fact, no contest.

Answer 24

Global warming is a fact - it is measurable and its affects observable. The extent to which man is causing it, however, is debatable.

Answer 25

Global warming is a scam.

Answer 26

I watched a programme on BBC before Christmas, I think it was called Saving the Planet or something, and the presenter said that the earth is just coming out of an Ice Age and the planet is in fact warming up after the Ice Age.  Draw your own conclusions from that!  I think global warming is in fact a news story generated by the worlds' governments to keep up all under control by taxing us to the hilt and make us all feel guilty.

Answer 27

It has only become news in the past few years.  

The theory of the "greenhouse effect" has been around since the 1800s and makes life as we know it on this planet comfortable.  There are natural cycles of heating and cooling that bring on ice ages and warm periods such as we are having now, but in general the climate on the planet is "just right" much of the time.  Life migrates with ice ages and warm periods to zones they find more comfortable.  They may evolve to take advantage of the climate, or die if they cannot evolve fast enough.

The current theory about accelerated Anthropogenic Global Warming  (AGW) started in the late 1970s or early 1980s.  NASA earth scientists (I think James Hansen was primarily responsible for raising the issue) noticed that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had been steadily increasing since the industrial revolution.  He also noticed the correlation between CO2 and temperature - a very tight and strong correlation.  Correlation is not cause and effect - you can't say CO2 causes increases in temperature.  CO2 may be produced by rising temperatures - and is because decay increases as temperature increases.  Also, CO2 is absolutely required for plants to grow.  Without plant growth, all animal life (including humans) on the planet would cease, so you don't really want to eliminate all atmospheric CO2.

But scientists noticed while investigating the potential impact of increasing atmospheric CO2 that an increase in this trace gas in an controlled environment increases the ambient air temperature, and can lead to a sharp increase in the primary greenhouse gas - water vapor.  The natural CO2 cycle that dominated the earth for years has been disrupted.  Plants that absorb CO2 and died millions of years ago were now releasing their CO2 back into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.  The balance between what is released and what is absorbed is out of wack because of intense use of fossil fuels and decreasing land base for plants to make use of the CO2.  A big wild card in this is the oceans, since that contains most of the plant life and absorbs much of the CO2.

The scientist proposed a theory. Theories are not wild-assed guesses but reasonable ideas base on careful observations that seem to predict the future  pretty well. Other theories include evolution, how air planes fly, gravity, and atomic structure.  Most of these theories have proven very useful for predicting outcomes and reactions.

Testing the theory of AGW is difficult, because we cannot observe it on a planetary scale through experimentation.  We have not other planet like earth that we can manipulate the atmosphere on.  Scientist use the laws of physics to make models that predict the CLIMATE (climate is not = to weather).  They use these model to predict the climate in the past and compare the results to what they think they have observed.  When they get a good match, they predict the climate in the future. This is how they establish cause and effect.  This is very difficult and requires climatologist, oceanographers, biologist to figure out the relationships and impacts.  The theory explains things pretty well as far as we can tell.

The "fight" now (in the general public - the scientist are pretty much over the "fight") is not whether the earth is getting warmer.  This has now been observed especially in the polar and high elevations (as predicted by the models).  The fight in the public is the causes.  Many people say it is all natural.  This was an 80s debate in the scientific community, and most scientist now believe that much (not all) of the warming is from human activities.  To get an unbiased overview, look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, National Academy of Sciences, or the EPA.  

The "critics" will say these are biased, but the truth is, the critics are biased and cling to "willful ignorance" and say all science is biased.  They will not read the science and typically overstate anti-AGW positions of scientist or completely mis-represent it.  Just ignore these people.

Answer 28

I beleive its just a worldly cycle. I mean, even volcanoes throw poisonous gasses in the air, and they are what makes this earth work...Ice ages come and go and the "heat ages", whatever they call those. I don't think that man is destroying our ozone, but then again i'm not the scientist here. I mean think about it....after the ice ages, everything was Ice...and it's been depleting ever since? The icecaps are just left over. That's how we have the Great Lakes, they are just huge puddles left over from the ice that was once there and melted. The ice has been melting for thousands of years, before we even started being industrialized. I think we are bound to freeze over again in the next few hundred years.

Answer 29

government scare tacticts to s***w more tax out of us. the earth is heating up but its nothing to do with our polution. its just a natural climate shift. happens every so many thousands of years. there is nothing we can do about it although the muppets in parliment blame us so they can s***w us yet again.

Answer 30

I always say - a news story! If it was really that bad and if humans could change it, like by using cars less, then the people in charge would bloody sort the horrendous public transport out!

Answer 31

I am amazed at how many people are continuing to deny that mankind is causing global warming.  The evidence is clear but these people continue to believe it is a conspiracy or a scam involving governments.

Well why should governments wish to frighten us with this story?  Generally governments get elected by saying "we are going to bring about economic growth and more lavish lifestyles".  Since when did a government get elected by saying "what we need is a halt to economic growth and the adoption of simpler lifestyles"?

The fact is that ever since the industrial revolution we have been burning fossil fuels and causing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the air to rise.  Carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that prevent the world from getting too cold but the rapid increase in the concentration of CO2 is causing unusual warming that is getting far too rapid to cope with.

It is true many features of the natural world such as CO2 concentrations and average temperatures fluctuate in a cyclical fashion but the release of CO2 from fossil fuels is not part of the natural cycle and is leading to more rapid change than the natural world, including mankind, can cope with.

So why does it matter?  Well during natural cooling and warming cycles plants and animals gradually mutate and migrate to cope with the changing circumstances.  But the accelerated warming that we are causing would not provide enough time for this to happen and many species would get wiped out.  Mankind too will find that flooding in some regions and droughts in others would be devastating leading to huge economic and social upheaval.

But there is good news.  Providing people recognise what is happening and use their wits and technology urgently to deal with the problem we can achieve a reasonably comfortable transition from dependence on fossil fuels and excessive consumption to a more sustainable way of life.

Of course, as I indicated earlier, governments are afraid to tell us what is needed.  That is why they appointed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to set out the facts and what needs doing.  My advice is not to believe the cynics but instead to read the Summary for Policymakers on the IPCC web site.  The longer we delay the more expensive and difficult the transition.

Best wishes for a sustainable future.