How could there have been man-made global warming before man existed?

Question

Findings by geologists from the liberal University of Wisconsin-Madison

http://www.livescience.com/environment/080623-harsh-climate.html

Answer 1

Global Warming is propagated  by the LEFT and Gore. it is just a scam to make money. Hope U don't buy into it...We could be causing Global Cooling ,as last year it was cold.

Answer 2

It doesn't say anything about man-made global warming.

You need to get your facts straight, buddy.

Answer 3

The dinosaurs drove SUVs!

Answer 4

the website is wrong...you can't have man made global warming without man.*

Answer 5

This is a brilliant question!  I’d bet that no one has ever bother to investigate paleoclimatology before. Here’s another mind-twister – How could forest fires have existed before there was mankind? Man is responsible for numerous forest fires around the world!

Answer 6

Man's contribution to global warming is a scant 100ppm increase over the last 100 years.  

If you give man all the credit for this increase, that's an increase of just 1ppm (part per million) per year!

I doubt any change of the climate could come from an additional molecule per million.

Clearly all warming is natural, and man cannot cause any change in the climate.

Answer 7

silly title, since you now say that the article says nothing about man-made global warming.

<<Of course it doesn't mention man-made global warming. That is the point of the findings. I thought you members of the new religion of global warming were so insightful, intuitive and have maybe a little common sense.>>

ummm, it seems to most of us that the "man made religion" is that global warming, in the unlikely event that it exists, is not man made.

<<All we keep hearing about is Acid rain (btw greenies, what ever happened to this man-made problem that was going to destroy the planet? We were all going to shrivel-up and die from skin cancer) and the greenhouse effect and that it is man made.>>

i don't think us "greenies" said that.  the problem is that you "we don't careies" make up lies and try to attribute them to us greenies.

<< How could it have been man made 4 billion years ago? >>

gee, just 2 sentences ago, you said,  "Of course it doesn't mention man-made global warming".  why to you continue to make stuff up?  unlike some, we can remember stuff for at least 2 sentences.

<<And how could the early Earth have had such high levels of carbon dioxide (co2) — perhaps 10,000 times as much as today when there were no fossil fuel burning engines/motors of any type?>>

AND, there were no plants to use the CO2 and create oxygen.  you really ought to take a science class.  or is that really beyond you?

<< There wasn't even big oil or Haliburton polluting the planet. Not even any cavemen rubbing two sticks together to start a fire. Bottom line, this study proves that man-made global warming is bull shiite.>>

4 billion years ago?  yep.  your made up story surely is, as you say, "bull shiite".

<<5 minutes ago  Hey Bob, here's thirty-five cents. Go call the geologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and tell them that they are wrong. Your little links mean nothing to me (or them).>>

OH, now we're getting to the heart of the problem.  literacy.

Answer 8

There wasn't.

Your link makes no mention of man-made global warming. It discusses the greenhouse effect, but that can clearly be altered by both natural and man-made activity.

Edit:

As I said before, the greenhouse effect can come from BOTH natural and man-made activity. I don't see why you fail to understand that very simple statement.  CO2 is a molecule that is naturally emitted from decaying plants and the ocean, but it also comes from burning fossil fuels (i.e. human activities).  There's no mystery or liberal bias to those scientific facts.

And Bob doesn't need $0.35 to call the Geologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison because he doesn't disagree with them. You are simply confused.

Answer 9

There cannot have been man-made global warming before man existed.  Unless sometime in the future, man invents a time machine and travels back in time before man and releases some CO2 into the atmosphere.

However, the article that you cite makes no claim that man-made global warming occurred before man existed.  It does mention that Earth's carbon levels were once higher than they are now, but no one disputes that, and no one uses that to argue against climate change.

Answer 10

The earth's climate is always changing.  It's not overly dramatic usually, just gentle swings back and forth from warming to cooling.  This is evident from the knowledge that it happened before man was here.  The current warming trend has ended actually, since there has been no warming since 1998.  It has leveled off, and many feel we could soon be entering another cooling phase.  Manmade global warming therefore is a fad promoted by those with agendas that go far beyond anything to do with climate.

Answer 11

I always find it amusing when questions like this are posted by people who no idea of what they are talking about.

The atmosphere of Earth 4 billion years ago was totally alien, little life living now could have survived then. The first basic lifeforms used up a lot of the Co2 and converted it to oxygen this took several billion years before more complex life evolved to use the oxygen that was then in the atmosphere, we are the other end of that process, the geologist in your link don't try mentioning GW because 'they' understand the processes.

Of course there was no man made climate change before man existed an no scientist has ever made such a silly claim. There were numerous natural causes release of Co2 from oceans, solar variability, orbital changes, even asteroid impacts. The thing is scientists are the ones who discovered those things as well, and none of them are happening at the moment, but we are here now and we are producing 27 billion tons of co2 a year, and increasing.

Benjamin "a real mind twister" not really much of a mind twister at all, many forest fires were and still are caused by lighting.

Dr Jello - "a scant 100ppm"

As the total co2 ~100 years ago was ~280 and it is now 385 is ~30% increase some new meaning for the word scant that I am not familiar with.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/scant

I think this word would be a far better description of your knowledge of science in general.

Answer 12

I didn't see anywhere in that article where it said that the global warming was caused by man. Global warming does occur naturally. The earth has been at warmer temperatures than it is now. The difference is that people are causing it to occur at a much faster RATE than what it would on its own. Since it is occurring faster the ecological systems aren't able to adapt.

Answer 13

There are many things that can affect climate, and have done so in the past.

But the data proves THIS particular warming is mostly caused by man made greenhouse gases.  The science behind that is huge, and overwhelming, here's just one useful article.

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...

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.

EDIT - There's no contradiction between global warming theory and the article you cite, which deals ONLY with the very distant (and very different) past.  No doubt the UW-Madison geologists believe the PRESENT warming is mostly man made, as do most all scientists.

Answer 14

Man-made before man?  What?  CO2 is not man made, and "intense weathering" could also refer to a couple billion years of average weathering.

Answer 15

The denier argument that it can only natural is rubbish, just as man made climate change doesn't rule out natural climate change the reverse is also true.