HELP! PROFFESIONALS ONLY ANSWER. My hypothesis humans are the cause / blame of global warming.?

Question

DO YOU AGREE OR DISAGREE OR ANY COMMENTS FOR MY COLLEGE REPORT

Answer 1

Yes, they are.

Answer 2

The role of CO2 in our atmosphere has been substantially exaggerated, probably for financial and political reasons. It is a factor, but only one in many.

Greenhouse gasses are just one element that makes up our climate.

CO2 as a whole is only a small part of the greenhouse effect.

Human activity contributes only a tiny fraction of the CO2 in the atmosphere.

Therefore the effect of human activity on the climate as a whole is minute, if anything at all.

Carbon dioxide is NOT pollution, it is a natural and vital component in our atmosphere. Without it there would be no life on this planet at all.

Answer 3

Disagree - There are other factors at play, mainly sun activity & natural environments changes.  We have not helped things but its not just man.

Answer 4

On the whole I disagree - According to Eugene N. Parker Jan 2002. What, then, is responsible for global warming so far? A safe bet is that from 1900 until 1950, global warming was driven mainly by the solar brightening, as solar magnetic activity increased by a factor of two or three during this period. Atmospheric CO2 could not have been a major contributor, because it had increased by only about 7% before 1950, when the warming leveled off for a couple of decades. After 1950, however, solar activity showed no significant rise, while atmospheric CO2 increased by 20%, accounting for the warming from 1970 to 2000. Atmospheric CO2 is therefore presumably the controlling factor for the coming century as well.

But this does not mean that human emissions are responsible for the growing accumulation of atmospheric CO2. The atmosphere contains about 750 gigatons of CO2, while total annual human emission is approximately 5.5 Gt, thus adding annually roughly 0.7% of the total. However, there is also an estimated exchange of 90 Gt per year between the atmosphere and the oceans. This means that Human CO2 emissions do not simply linger and accumulate in the atmosphere. They are rapidly distributed to the ocean surface, so that atmospheric CO2 remains at an equilibrium level.

This equilibrium is, in turn, determined by the temperature of ocean surface water. So it is plausible that the solar-driven ocean warming between 1900 and 1950 started things off by shifting the equilibrium toward higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, accelerating global warming since then. So, while our own contribution of CO2 is not helping matters, it hardly seems to be the determining factor. On the available evidence, then, skeptics of the Kyoto Treaty appear to have a powerful case.

Answer 5

Actually read Jim Z's answer. Geologists are working with limited reliable data, only about three billion years' worth. Climatologists, on the other hand, are working with the grand total of at most 200 years of reliable data.

I am a lifelong student of complex systems. The global climate may be the most complex of all complex systems of which we are aware. In a complex system every component interacts directly and/or indirectly with every other component. There are certainly billions, and probably trillions, of components in the global climate complex system. Man-made CO2 is one of them. No one has yet considered this component's interactionn with the recent impact on Jupiter by the pieces of Shoemaker-Levy 9; that had an effect on our climate.

Geologists and climatologists have conflicting theories, both of which appear correct. Geologists note that the earth is cooling. This is a long-term trend, more than 10,000 years. Climatologists are correct, the earth is warming. This is a short-term trend, perhaps a couple of centuries. Contrarian trends within long-term trends are a familiar phenomenon in complex systems.

I am prepared to believe that man-made CO2 emissions are the cause/blame of global warming. Before I come to that conclusion I need to understand the interactions among the components of the complex system. We simply know far too little.

An example: We have been studying the global climate for only a few decades, but we have been building bridges for more than 4,000 years. A bridge exists within a complex system, albeit far less complex than the global climate. We knew so little about the Minneapolis I-35 bridge's complex system, after 4,000 years, that we could not prevent its collapse. Why do we believe that we have complete knowledge of, and perfect understanding of, the global climate complex system?

Japanese scientists have been studying tsunamis for centuries. They first proposed shallow water wave physics half a millenium ago. In the last 50 years we have devoted far more science and resources to the study of tsunamis than we have to the global climate. We are still so ignorant of the complex system within which a tsunami acts that thousands died recently in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps, if someone offers a "fix" to tsunamis that involves massive transfer of wealth from western dermocracies to other countries (that's the underlying and openly stated goal of the Kyoto Protocols) then perhaps we'd have billions in grant money available to study them.

I do not disbelieve anthropogenic global warming. I also do not believe it. We have minimal data about a contrarian trend witihin a long-term trend, minimal data about a single component of an incredibly complex system, yet claim that we know everything we need to know to bankrupt western democracies. Give me a break.

Answer 6

In the last ice age, there wasnt as many humans living on the planet, nature did it! when I was 13, (now 40ish) the beach where I lived had 12 inches of snow on it, and the rock pools froze! there wasnt as much industry then as there is now! scientists are looking for someone to blame, humans are the easiest option, what about volcano's, earth quakes, whirlwinds, etc, they were all here before we all were!

Answer 7

Whether we are the cause of global warming or not, we are still hugely damaging the earth. If you look at the electronics industry, which is the fastest growing waste stream in the UK at the moment, for every tonne of electronics we throw away, there is hundreds of tonnes of it's "hidden rucksack", this is the amount of earth ore and rubble we have to move / create to make the products in the first place.

http://www.rsa.org.uk/projects/weee_man....

Global warming or not. This is not good and can be spread to any other industry / activity we undertake.

It's not a matter of saving the planet. It's a matter of saving the human race (and the animals we share it with). The planet will bounce back once we've gone.

Is it too late? A lot in my industry think it is.

Answer 8

Agree, but the proof is much too extensive for a short answer.  It's in the links.

This is science and what counts is the data.

"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

Here are two summaries of the mountain of peer reviewed data that convinced Admiral Truly and the vast majority of the scientific community, short and long.

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

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

summarized at:

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

There's a lot less controversy about this is the real world than there is on Yahoo answers:

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/a...

And vastly less controversy in the scientific community than you might guess from the few skeptics talked about here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_...

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

EVERY major scientific organization has issued an official statement that this is real, and mostly caused by us.  The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Association, etc.

Good websites for more info:

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/f101.a...

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sci...

http://www.realclimate.org

"climate science from climate scientists"

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

Answer 9

"Cut & Paste Bob" is at it again.  If you look at all of his answers the past year or so, they are all the same 2 or 3 responses.  

Anyway, I disagree because we do not really contribute as much CO2 into the atmosphere as the media and well-funded scientists will have you believe.  Plus the temperature has dropped over the past decade while CO2 output continues to rise.  So that correllation is "out the door".

If you look at data charts that are not manipulated by (i.e. Mann's hockey stick chart and others just like it), you will see that we are not increasing in temperature faster than ever before.  In fact, all climate scientists will admit that there have been swings in global temperature of 5 degrees in as little as a decade quite a few times before in our history.  Now the latest scare scenario is how we have increased 0.6 degrees in a little over 140 years.  Well, we were in a little ice age 140 years ago and that ended because the cooling trend ended.  Data shows that during the Medival Times it was a few degrees warmer than it is today.  So why are we worried about our climate returning to normal?  The sad part is, the answer to this question is money.  There is money to be made off of this nonsense.  

The premise to the global warming scare tactics is a good one.  Clean up the planet and develop cleaner fuels.  I like that idea, but I don't want them taxing me in order to save them money on R&D.

Answer 10

Avon said "Human activity is accelerating climate change, whatever natural cycles may also be contributing."

As a geologist and environmental consultant, I can say that avon's answer is really not relavant to the question.  You asked if humans are the cause for global warming.  Humans have produced some CO2 and have probably thus increased the temperature.  This doesn't mean that we caused warming.  We simply added slightly to the natural trend.  There is no indication that CO2 has ever driven climate, aside from some recent theories that are probably made to acquire more global warming funding.  Too suggest we are accellerating climate change demonstrates to me that suggester has a bias.  There is insufficient knowledge to make those conclusions.  It is important to acknowledge what you know and what you don't know.  Those that pretend to know more than they do are generally pushing an agenda.  Warming has always been beneficial to mankind.  Cooling has always been catastrophic.

Answer 11

Humans are not "the" cause although they have a major contribution / responsibility.

Answer 12

Human activity is accelerating climate change, whatever natural cycles may also be contributing.

Answer 13

Humans are to blame for global warming. The evidence stacks up. The septics are supplying flaky data or no data to support their case. Certainly we do not know all the complexities of the climate system. But I totally reject the idea that one has to know all of a complex system before one can make reliable statements of cause and effect concerning such a system.

the human body is another very complex system and we certainly do not know all of it in any great detail. doesn't stop us developing all sorts of medicines and treatments and interventions. Most of which work just as intended. While we do not know all the 'bits of how our brain stores memory, it doesn't stop us using tried and tested methods of memorising things

So we may not know all there is to know about climate, nor all we wish to know. BUT we know enough to make some fairly straight forward deductions. Add more green house gases to the atmosphere and you get more insulation resulting in warmer temperatures.

Burn more fossil fuels releasing carbon that has been stored for eons out of the carbon cycle and you increase the amount of carbon in the active carbon cycle.  This is straight forward stuff.

Sure we know far too little about some of the little niceties of interactions etc, but it doesn't change the big picture.  Remember that is why there is no much uncertainty in the actual effects, just how much warming how quickly how much feedback, how much sea level rise. Note not about it happening but just exactly how much and how soon.

It appears increasingly that not enough has been understood about positive feed back mechanisms and so it is likely that a lot of the estimates are underestimates!

Answer 14

Research "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

or "Global warming Hoax"

It's all you need to know.