How do we know that the climate is changing and that it's not a cycle?

Question

I mean, how do we know that this change (assuming the temperatures are rising) is not a part of a cycle and that everything will return to the way it was with time?

Answer 1

Just open you're eyes an take a good look at the amount  of cars & trucks in the world , then look at all of the production plants and look at the amount of plants that are destroyed daily, we're not stopping this  or cutting back enough to help the balance of our planet   ...

Answer 2

BECAUSE THE CYCLE WOULD'NT WEAKEN THE NATURAL OZONE AND OVER FLOW THE LIQUIDS ON EARTH, JUST USE NATURAL MEANS AVAILABLE IN ITS PATH.

Answer 3

Wikipedia is a wiki meaning anyone can contribute, change or enter information.

We do not know that it's not a cycle. I have heard that we are in a mini ice age right now which mean the polar bears never had so much ice to live on.

Answer 4

Because the climate naturally would not be so dramatically

altered like it is now,and there is obvious signs like melting polar and Antarctic ice and most of all the glaciers are melting at a non-normal level.

Answer 5

The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations" via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC, the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.

Answer 6

Any and everything can become a cycle. That's where establishing a nominal temp is important...just a lot of dispute over what is a normal/optimal temp. That question has been ask many times with no affirmative reply.

Answer 7

Scientists know all about cycles.  They say the data clearly proves this is NOT a natural cycle.  The details are in the links below.

This is science and what counts is the data, not people's intuition.

"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 8

It's a cycle.  Humans weren't messing anything up during the ice age before - or when the earth was 20 degrees hotter than it is now.

Answer 9

It is a cycle.  Don't let the alarmists scare you into thinking that the world is gonna end because the climate is changing....the climate is ALWAYS changing.

Here's a link to a report 32000 US scientists approve of http://www.petitionproject.org/gwdatabas...

If you want a link to a chart that alone proves that the current warming is natrual here's one http://www.oism.org/pproject/Slides/Pres...

Answer 10

It's not a cycle. The patterns of temperatures keep getting worse not getting better, we are are record highs, it's never been this way before so it can't be a cycle

Answer 11

1 The temperature anomaly

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

Of course, this alone doesn't shed light on the cause; it just shows something's out of whack, possibly natural, so read on.

2 The fact that the five year average has been on the rise since the 70's: this is completely unprecedented. According to right wing blogs and "news" outlets and Christian 'Science' bastions the sun is responsible for most of temperature anomaly (Note: anomaly is different from base temperature). However, the sun goes through 11 year cycles, not 30 year cycles. So we know it can't be the sun.

3 So it has to be some other variable. We know these non-solar variables are particularly influential on climate: sulfates, aerosols, greenhouse gases, ozone, and volcanic emissions. Which one has the greatest correlation? See for yourself:

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

4 And the winner is . . . . CO2!

But again, correlation does not necessarily mean causation. Hence, the theory of anthropogenic global warming is, alas, a theory. Just like evolution and the big bang.

5 And how do we know some other non-solar variable isn't at play? If such a variable had such a dramatic effect on the environment (look back at that temperature anomaly--pretty significant), it most likely would have been discovered by now. Disregard those 'shot-in-the-dark' theories you'll hear by desperate right wing, ExxonMobile funded 'scientists' with political agendas (see: Cosmic Ray Theory). They do nothing but unnecessarily prolong the debate; legitimate debate is one thing--unfalsifiable theories with flimsy evidence behind them and cries of Malthusian fear mongering are a whole other thing.

Answer 12

As a geologist, I can assure that change is the norm.  There is no normal temperature and sea level, at least not since there has been an Ice age, (last 3 million years or so).  It is extremely difficult to know how much man has influenced the climate since there is no way for us to know exactly what the climate would have been without human influence.