How do we know that climate change is caused by CO2 emissions and not by activity on the sun?

Question

Thank you for all the answers so far. Many of them contain words such possible, opinion and other vague words. What I want to know is, what evidence is there for CO2 being picked as the culprit before I rush out and spend a lot of money altering my entire lifestyle when it might just be the sun causing the problem, about which we can do nothing.

Answer 1

You don't, you just have to trust a load of lying politicians and hope maybe one will give a strait answer instead of another tax, and if it really is our cars then its time every one did an embargo on the USA as thy are the biggest car users and they do not give a d**n as long as they can ride around in great big 4 x4 Jeeps of 8.5 Lt. 8 4 to 5 time more polluting than an average European car.

Answer 2

As Arnold said, it's not republican air/enviorment. It's not a democratic enviorment or air. It's EVERYONE'S BOZO. So stop politicizing science for a change. You sound like the Catholic church in the middle ages

Answer 3

But we do know that the sunspot activities of the sun are more prevelant and these teemed with greater CO2 emissions is possibly the main cause of global warming.

Answer 4

That's not what we're saying at all.  Why can't both of those things impact climate change? That's what most scientists think.

Answer 5

The Sun is a mass of energy, that as we speak is slowly dying, so in a couple of million years wont be there anymore.  But I agree with the format of the question, there has to more to Global warming then just CO2 emissions.  Someone said blame Space Travel for causing the hole in the ozone layer!!!!!!

Answer 6

We don't. In fact, I think that it is the sun that is causing it. I've seen a chart that shows temperature change and CO2 levels, and then one with temperature change and the number of sunspots, and the second chart is soooo much more closely related.  Also, only 3% of the total CO2 is put there by humans, while the rest is from decaying plants, volcanoes, etc. One last thing, throughout the measured history of CO2 and temperature, the CO2 has been known to rise FOLLOWING the rise in temperature.  Please Please Please don't get caught up in this mess. The more people who do, the more likely we are to lose all of this wonderful wealth that we get from industrialism.

Answer 7

Scientists use computer models to calculate how warm the earth should be based on the the enrgy emitted by the sun through time. They also calculate the temperature of the earth based on othe factors, the main one being volcanic activity, which affect the natural greenhouse gas concentrations. These are compared to the known earth temperatures, based on records such as tree rings, ocean sediments, etc. Up to about the start of the industrial revolution, the temperatures could be reconstructed accurately based on solar and volcanic activity. However in the past couple of hundred years the measured and predicted temperatures have diverged. Whilst based on solar and volcanic activity we should be gradually cooling, we are inwarming up significantly.

When anthroogenic factors (CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere as a result of human activity) are added to the models, we are once again able to model the current temperature trends accurately.

As another piece of evidence, looking at and the CO2 concentrations and comparing them to temperature, the graphs are remarkably similar. (see the graph on the IPCC page)

Yes solar activity varies, and yes climate varies naturally, but based on natural variations in the amount of energy we receive from the the sun (which are not entirely due to the temperature of the sun, but are due to factors such as sun spots and variations in our orbit around the sun) we should in fact be cooling down now.

The american geophysical union (made up of thousands of earth scientist, atmospheric scientists, climatologists etc) has released a statement stating that climate change is hapenning and is as a result of human activity.

Answer 8

Science.

Answer 9

There is a wealth of evidence loads and loads and loads. It's not rocket science but it is complicated.  Please trust the scientists - they really are not out to get you. I have answered loads of questions on this so please go through my answers if you want more details.

The bottom line is that CO2 absorbs infra red heat in the atmosphere reflected from the earths surface due to heating from the sun.

CO2 lags behind temperature in the record because of the thermal inertia of the oceans (in case you want to believe that GGWS 'popumentary' nonsense).

Humans emit ~25 billions of tonnes of CO2 per year - about five times that of volcanoes.

The sun's activity has an effect, but the CO2 in the atmosphere acts as an amplifier.  So even if the sun does warm we warm even more because of our CO2 blanket.

Answer 10

Stop believing the non-sense. There has been weather and climate changes for the life of the plant, with or without people. The world and climate will change period. You cant stop it, you can't speed it up or slow it down, Man made polution can not even compare to natural polutions, valcano's etc., we have a self healing planet. We we become a problem we will just be extincted and the world will evolve and new life will take over. You are wasting your time trying to figure it out or doing something about it.

Answer 11

We don't.  There's not enough evidence to say conclusively one way or the other, but if I had to guess I'd say that changes in solar output are a much larger driver of climate change than is CO2.

First, let's look at CO2.

CO2 causes a portion of the heat trying to escape the earth into space (i.e., electromagnetic radiation in the long infrared wavelengths) to be reflected back and absorbed -- this is the "greenhouse effect".  But that same reflecting effect also causes a portion of the sunlight that heats the earth to be reflected back into space -- a cooling effect that most of the climate models ignore!

Now, let's look at solar output.

Increased solar output causes not only an increase in the global temperature of the atmosphere but also an increase in radiative heat transfer, i.e., the heating of the earth's surface due to incident solar radiation.

Finally, let's look at some evidence and see what is causing it.  I'd like to mention specifically the glacial retreat.

If global warming were due entirely to CO2, we would expect to see a glacier retreat about 300 - 500 feet up the mountain for every 1 degree of global temperature increase.  What we are seeing instead is that glaciers are being reduced at all altitudes, not just retreating up the mountain.  That strongly suggests to me that increased solar output is at least partly the culprit, and not just (or maybe not even at all) CO2.

This is just one example piece of evidence.  I'm sure there are countless others.  Here's one more thing to consider: the ice core records show that temperature increases actually PRECEDE CO2 increases by several hundred years -- i.e., the temperature rises THEN the CO2 levels start to rise.  This has been going on for tens of thousands of years.  A reasonable application of Occam's Razor would lead one to conclude that it's the temperature change that drives the change in CO2, not the other way around.

Answer 12

climate change doesnt start with CO2 emissions.  It starts with sunspot and solar flare activity.  Im sur you have heard of something called Solar Wind.  It is the force of photonic energy leaving the sun; it is especially strong during periods of sunspot and solar flare activity.  

It starts with the spots which generate huge offgassing events called solar flares.  These flares carry with them enormous amounts of energy, kind of like a wind gust at light speed.  It reaches earth and blows a little of our protecting atmosphere back so that the intense photonic energy (heat) penetrates easier and begins a 1-2 degree warming.  This then warms the very prolific artic and antartic oceans causing an algal bloom.

Now this is where many people leace off and leave a hole in the explanation, thinking everyone understands ocean ecology.  The algae begin producing huge amounts of oxygen to replenish a depleted atmosphere, but the zooplankton eat the algae and grow to huge populations to take advantage of the plentiful food supply.  It is these zooplankton that give off enormous amounts of CO2 more than 100 times more than man can produce in 50 years.

If the sunspot activity stays around long enough, the solar flares heat the earth another 1-2 degrees and keeps the algae growth and plankton feeding frenzy going a while longer.  The sunspots go away, the atmosphere corrects itself, but the algae bloom continues, the normal off-gassing of the earth through volcanic action adds to the already rising CO2 levels along with ash and dust to creat a heat inversion layer that continues to heat up the earth and the glaciers melt and on and on and on....this is the same dance carried on hundreds of times over countless millennia.

There is something far more sinester behind the newest global warming craze.  If you would find a book called, "The Report From Iron Mountain" here online in *.pdf or *.doc format, you can read it and get an understanding of what I mean by my statement.  I believe it is just another focal point to keep the population focused elsewhere while big government does what it does.....strip us of our rights.

Mankind may add to this dance, but only an imperceptible amount.  It is the height of conceit to think mankind is all that powerful to destroy the ecology of a whole planet!  All we can do is poison it so WE cant live here any more...the planet lives on.........without us.  And from the perspective of any so-called "environmentalist", so long to bad rubbish.

Answer 13

Its all a load of rubbish!It has been proven that it is caused by the activity of the sun throughout the ages!

Answer 14

Nobody knows for certain.  The most likely answer is that each of these things contribute to some degree.

http://www.stuffintheair.com/ancient-cli...

...delineates past global climate changes that have taken place independent of human input.

Answer 15

Some people over in japan made a super computer that mimics the activities of earth. This computer is very accurate, it was the one that predicted the first hurricane below the hemishpere, and sure enough 2 years later it happened. Well they plugged in data to say human's never existed, and the earth didn't change all that much. But they plugged in humans and their current evolution, and guess what? global warming became a serious problem. We also know that CO2 destroys the particles that make up our ozone layer from lab tests.

Answer 16

Because of the rate (speed) of change.

Answer 17

We don't. All we can do is listen to both sides of the argument and then form our own opinions. How do we know that scientists are not causing the changes by coming up with the idea of seeding the clouds? That programme was on TV the other night. It's frightening what scientists get up to. Wait till they are successful with the particle acceleration programme!Nothing and nobody will survive.

Answer 18

We do not. The various vested interests in the Global Warming science have to keep up the pretence in order to have vast government funding. The fact that the world has been warming up, on average, since the last ice age is not taken into account. At the time of the dinosaurs the world was much hotter and the seas much higher. I think that it is time for the so called ecologists to stop shouting and listen to other opinions, but like all minorities they won't do that.

Answer 19

We don't, however the study of sun spots is done by NASA which has two brand new and fully funded spacecraft dedicated to studying the Sun so if scientists want more money to study CO2 they need to look elsewhere to get it.  It's the same story with volcanic CO2 emmissions which are far far larger than man's but also well under stood and funded already.  Basicaly since global warming scares people its a good revenue producers for far out science.