Global warming or global alarmism?

Question

There's people that believe global warming can be explained by cyclical weather patterns and not human activity.

The majority of the scientific community seems to agree that humans are contributing to climate change. What do you think?

Answer 1

I think 17,200 scientists (which must not make up any of the "majority of the scientific community") signed this petition saying they believe it is alarmism.

Answer 2

People are taking "global warming" too drastically. Nothing is really going to happen. Al Gore is an idiot, humans aren't causing it. It's a normal stage perhaps for the planet. Next is the Ice Age, or maybe those "scientists" may call it "global cooling" in the future. Let's just hope those "scientists" don't blame it on us again!

Answer 3

the scariest part of Global warming is what we are not being told

Global Warming is true, there are Natural fazes but we are affecting that to a great extent ,with deforestation ,desertification and pollution., especially air pollution.

A few weeks ago one of NASA's top scientists concluded that the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free within five years, much faster than all previous predictions.

when the north pole is gone , you may have polar bears soon in America ,looking for a home ,

Calculations do not include the accumulative ,speeding up ,factor with time. the increase in water temperature will get faster all the time as well as the melting, when the ice is all gone the deeper cold Ocean currents will be drastically affected,which in turn will affect the warm currents,since all moving bodies of water are connected in series.

This will affect coastal climates ,world wide ,almost instantly. All aquatic flora and fauna will be affected,many dying off and others becoming invasive,

And recently In Chiapas ,and Tabasco in Mexico .more then a million people became homeless overnight with water coming up to their roofs ,because of rains from super evaporation from the forests,this had never happened before. Millions of animals died.

In India 3000 people died because of super storms .

.A few years ago in Europe 3500 people,died during a heat wave ,many of them in France .

Right now the average death toll annually is 150.000 due to Global warming

. these figures are already out of date and are expected to double soon.

In Northern China millions of people are running for their lives because regular dust storms so far have buried 900 villages under the sand and the whole of northern China is turning into a dessert.

The Sahara is growing by 7 kilometers a year all around the edges ,like a slow burning fire shriveling up their neighbors In the Kalahari huge rivers have dried up and thousand of species are gone due to their habitats disappearing .

The biggest changes are invisible at micro biotic levels species are becoming extinct ,others are multiplying ,

This affects the insect populations that follow ,and changes in that ,affect all that follows in the food chains ,

All life is interrelated of both flora and fauna, And since we are on the top of the food chain ,

we are always the last to know.

So Global warming has its toll there are incidents all over the world ,

However

confusion rules the day ,i am beginning to think that SCIENCE HAS BEEN INVADED WITH POLITICS AND HUMAN EMOTIONS

The truth is being distorted at high levels,

And lies have been weaved in.

Some of the real dangers are being hidden because there are no solutions , Public could panic.and Authorities would loose control .

Besides Corporations have other priorities and changes will cause loss of profits ,this also affects the truths being published

Others facts are exaggerated so that the phenomena can be used to milk the people.

This is further complicated with Arrogance that will not admit that mankind could be guilty, or that Gods could be out of control ,unloving or incompetent

But I do not think we can make a real difference anymore to change the tide.

On a Global scale,Humanity is not co operative enough .

The poor regions have other priorities such as daily survival.

There is a lot we can do about being more responsible with what we got ,

In the first world countries many do not care or are more interested in Global Control than Global Warming.

Answer 4

I think that's a Great question. The most popular information out there and most credited/recognized explains that WE are responsible, not the weather. ..so i have to go with that. I have not seen any information about the cyclical weather patterns, yet i've seen tons on greenhouse gases, pollution, overpopulation contributing to the crisis.

Answer 5

The scientific community is correct.  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 6

The founder of the Weather Channel has come out and said it himself that man-made Global Warming is a scam! The government is only trying to hype up the people.

These scientists only claim that humans are contributing because they receive funding from the government for saying so.

Answer 7

Oh yes, because humans cause ice ages. Least I forget.

Let me guess, the dinosaurs caused the last glacial period?

Answer 8

everyone who farts contributes to a Global Climate change.  even animals.

i think that ppl who post long answer need to get a life...