How can we be the cause of global warming if...?

Question

-A single volcanic eruption produces more carbon dioxide than we do in a year?

-Carbon dioxide only consists of around 5% of the green house gases and 0.0383% of the entire atmosphere? (water vapor is the main 'greenhouse' gas to begin with)

-Many of earth's areas are getting cooler?

-Earth was warmer during the last interglacial time period?

-During the post-industrial revolution, temperatures started falling?

Btw, I'm asking these questions with an open mind. After hearing so many people at my school and my community talk about how global warming is a serious crisis, I decided to look further into the matter by doing my own research. I need to know both sides of the issue. If you can answer these questions above then I might be inclined to believe that we do cause global warming (assuming it even exists).

Answer 1

Post writer Adrian Higgins exudes the fumes of global warming hysteria: "Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased by a third since the start of the industrial revolution, due mostly to the burning of coal and other fossil fuels, and that buildup has been linked to global warming."

Think about this for a minute. The industrial revolution revved up around 1850 or so, and with all the population growth and industrial production over the last 158 years, carbon dioxide has increased by only a third? He does not mention that this constitutes only a microscopic percentage of the entire atmosphere encircling the earth.

Could this mean that people are not really a threat to the planet after all? That we can get on with planting trees because ... they're pretty?

Answer 2

We ,the human race has been cut loose with more knowledge than we have the ability to harness.Therefore we have become  destructive mass evolving into a gluttony of waste.

Answer 3

Not only that, the heat content of the oceans is about 1000 times the heat content of the atmosphere.  The oceans drive the climate.  It ain't the other way.

Answer 4

Because Al Gore said we are the cause.  Don't think for yourself!  Fall in line like a good herd.

Answer 5

crazypl...- i think you mean they "think" they have more knowledge, not they actually have a lot of knoweldge!  tis true though, having knowledge without wisdom makes them sound dumber than they think

Answer 6

http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/V...

"Human activities release more than 130 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of more than 8,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 3.3 million tonnes/year)! (Gerlach et. al., 2002)"

Water vapor is indeed the main greenhouse gas, but it's not the only greenhouse gas.  Comparing the percentage of CO2 to all the atmosphere is misleading, since most of the atmosphere is made up of non-greenhouse gases.  CO2 is responsible for 9 - 26% of all greenhouse warming effects. Since greenhouse gases keep our planet about 33 C warmer than it would be with no greenhouse gases, that means CO2 is responsible for a significant amount of that warming.

http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/cou...

Saying "many of earth's areas are getting cooler" is irrelevant.  How does one define "many"?  1%? 50%?  There's no scientific definition for such a term. What's important is the "global" average surface temperature, not that some small regional areas are slightly cooler. You can view a map of the world warming (very few areas cooling) over time at this NASA web-site:

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

I'm out of time for now, so I'll leave your other statements for someone else to respond too.

Answer 7

For the 10000th time,

Volcanic Co2 is about 200-240 million tons per year

Human Co2 is about 27 billion tons and growing

the U.S. alone produce about 6 billion tons

Using your co2 figure of 5% and allowing that Co2 has risen ~100ppm in the last century (8ppm in just the last four years)

so our contribution is only ~2% to the total Co2 in the atmosphere, nothing you say.

But if you take the temp of the Earth without any greenhouse gases ~-18c and what was the average temp with natural greenhouse gases ~14c, (32c difference) the 2% works out to be ~0.6c deg, guess how much the temp has gone up in the last century, about 0.6c deg. And the Co2 level from our contributions is only going up.

Answer 8

How can we be the cause of global warming if...?

-A single volcanic eruption produces more carbon dioxide than we do in a year? - doubtable

-Carbon dioxide only consists of around 5% of the green house gases and 0.0383% of the entire atmosphere? (water vapor is the main 'greenhouse' gas to begin with) true, if you call it a greenhouse gas

-Many of earth's areas are getting cooler? and the others are getting warmer? Global warming is happening and causing climate change. However its not proof that its caused by man kind.

-Earth was warmer during the last interglacial time period? I don't know.

-During the post-industrial revolution, temperatures started falling? Yeah, that may be so but its warmer now.

If your trying to say global warming is NOT happening, your undoubtably wrong.

Answer 9

I refer you to this question:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

It asks all those same points, and a few more.  Except that it doesn't address the second point.  And I suspect the global warming believers would say the answer to that is that 5% is enough.

Answer 10

Volcanos - as referenced by others - your "data" is flat wrong

Excess water vapor can't start warming, because it falls out as precipitation.  Excess CO2 stays there.  That little CO2 can indeed cause that much warming, it's simple physices.

Overall the Earth is getting warmer.  There are local variations.

What happened hundreds of thousands of years ago is not relevant.

Temperatures were constant (they didn't fall) because increased smoke from pollution balanced out the CO2.  As we proceeded to make even more CO2 it overwhelmed the smoke.  See:

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

and:

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

Did you really think thousands of scientists were ignoring those issues?

Answer 11

You answered your own question. we are not the cause.

Answer 12

Your data is wrong. One volcano, and indeed all volcanic CO2 emissions throughout any given year do not compare to the manmade CO2 emissions. Also, you might be interested in the graph here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbo...

Which shows clearly that there is a very strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and what we put into the atmosphere. The difference between the two curves is caused largely by the environment's ability to absorb some of the excess CO2, but this ability may be limited as temperatuers rise, and in any case it has never been enough to completely offset what we're doing.

Almost every area of the Earth is getting warmer. In any case, the point is that this is GLOBAL warming. So its the average that we're concerned about. Here is a map (taken from wikipedia) of the current global temperature anomalies (in other words the difference between current average temperature and historical average temperature):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Globa...

As you can see most areas, including all the inhabitable land areas of the planet, are warming up.

The Earth may well have been warmer during the last interglacial period. There are long-term natural variations in the climate record which are greater than anything we've seen so far. But this doesn't mean that we aren't the cause of the present variation (indeed from the evidence, the thing that distinguishes this change from previous changes is that today the planet is warming faster than it has at almost any point in history).

The threat of manmade global warming is the speed with which it happens. We have adapted our civilisation to a stable climate, and this will be subject to enormous change, which will kill millions and displace billions if nothing is done.

As you can see from the blip in the climate graph, temperatures did fall a touch, but they then started rising very quickly. The overall trend is overwhelmingly upwards, and today global temperatures are rising faster than at any point in our history.

As usual, if you're interested in global warming, I would direct you to the following articles on wikipedia:

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

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