I just took a class at Ball State University on Global Warming, and I was surprised...?

Question

At how LITTLE factual evidence there is on human-caused Global Warming! The "hockey stick" graph (Michael Mann) presented by Al Gore has actually been retracted. The data that the hottest days on record have been in the past ten years (NASA) has also been retracted as false information. Furthermore, the only polar bears that have drowned recently were four of them--and that was due to a storm, not due to drowning as Al Gore would like us to believe.

Many other things were pointed out to us in class as well--such as the sun is never directly on the arctic regions--sunlight reaches the place from an angle. And there's a time lag in the graphs Gore presented--CO2 increases AFTER temperature increases. And CO2 is actually good for the environment.

My question is: where is the evidence supporting man-caused global warming? Because I've never seen any beyond Al Gore's movie...

Answer 1

That's interesting, because at my school (Scripps Institution of Oceanography) they're constantly showing us new evidence of human-caused global warming, maybe Muncie is just too far from where the action is.  Of course, we've been studying it here longer than just about anybody--since even before Roger Revelle hired Charles Keeling to start taking measurements of carbon dioxide, so maybe we've just been paying closer attention. As far as the sun never being directly on the arctic regions, well, I suspect that's been known for thousands of years, so that's not much of a revelation.  Gore didn't do a very good job explaining that the CO2/warming  relationship works both ways--there is feedback in the system since as the ocean warms the solubility of CO2 goes down and more CO2 is released to the atmosphere.  If you're interested in seeing the evidence, take a look at the IPCC report "Climate Change: The Physical Science Basis" available online at http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.h...

or purchase a copy at your local bookstore.  It's an amazing scientific work.

Answer 2

Anyone here will tell you I believe man-made global warming is a joke.  The warming trend we're experiencing mirrors solar activity too consistently to be anything other than a reaction to solar forces.  That being said, I'd like to make one counter to one of your statements:

"They said animals have lived through such warming before and will again."

Animals in general, yes.  But ecosystems have to adapt to changing environments.  Some species do go extinct (as the fossil records readily indicate).  No one can really stop that, either.  What we CAN do is do our best to conserve what we have, as best we can, while we have it.  That's why I'm a conservationist...and a conservative.

Answer 3

Sorry, I don't believe a word you are saying.

Answer 4

Sassy,

Keep an open mind.  While you do raise interesting questions I'm suspecting the class was biased and designed to make the students think....  not to present scientific facts.

Here's my understanding:  Global warming can be evidenced by 25 years of satellite photos of the iceshelf of  Greenland and around the North Pole.  The ice covering the Arctic regions is significantly less than 50 years ago.

The ocean temperatures are measurably warmer than ever before...  The disolved carbon dioxide in ocean water is measurably greater than in over 100 years.

The polar bears you speak of were "lost at sea" when the ice they were living on broke away in a storm.  Forget the storm...  the ice should not have been that fragile.

The comment on CO2 is a misunderstanding.  While the gas is necessary as a plant food too much will be retained in the upper atmosphere where is will absorb solar heat and act as a blanket to further warm the planet.  An unbalanced amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could be a disaster.

I have not subscribed to any of Al Gore's hype....  but my friends working at NOAA are measuring climate warming.

Here's my concern as I live on the east coast.  With ocean warming the evaporation of ocean waters will be delivering moisture to the clouds at a greater rate. All that ocean evaporation will be brought down in greater rainfalls giving us more flooding and greater storms...   The flooding today along the Mississippi River might just be a further indication of a warmer climate that creates greater rainfalls.

You ask thoughtful questions...  and I congratulate you...  Now that the subject has peaked your curiosity why don't you make the science of climatology your major and go on for a graduate degree??

Answer 5

If you're a student, you should realize that Al Gore is hardly a source to be used seriously.  What he says or does has NO importance to the reality of global warming.  

The argument about the relationship between temperature and CO2 actually proves global warming is caused by us.

CO2 is BOTH a cause of warming (greenhouse effect) and an effect (warming ocean waters can hold less CO2 and emit the excess).  This is VERY basic science.

IN THE PAST CO2 lagged temperature, because it mostly was an effect.  THIS TIME THERE IS NO LAG, because CO2 is mostly a cause.

Tons more evidence here:

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

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

summarized at:

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

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...

People who seriously study the science (instead of worrying about Al Gore) KNOW that this is real.

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.

Answer 6

Sassy there isn't any "proof". There is some statistics and correlated events. CO2 levels and temperature are correlated but no one has shown causal. And correlation doesn't prove causation.

One of the things we would need to claim proof is a scientific test to show the causal relationship of C02 and heat but there isn't one. Oh you will get people to tell you why there isn't but folks if we can't test it it ain't science.

There are lots of things to read and I recommend reading both sides of the argument and learning all you can.

For all of the reasons you mention and others I am skeptical. The GW crowd claims it is settled but when something they claim comes up false we should ignore it and just trust them.

PS: Long tirades like rijim posted prove nothing. It isn't scientific data but for some reason he thinks it does.

Answer 7

WOW! I think I'm going to transfer to Ball State!!!

You were really told all that! I have been bombarded with the opposite. Fortunately there are a few Profs that I know of that will say what you said, but they are not very vocal about it. In other words, they allude to it, but wont come out and say the current theory is bunk.

BTW: One is a Geography prof, another teaches Meteorology, and the other is a Physics prof. Unfortunately, I never had them for class, but I did have one sub one day.

Hmm...GO CARDINALS then...:))

Answer 8

Clearly Ball State University is a place everyone should study at.  Finally, a sensible and knowledgable answer to a simmering debate.

Everything you learned was true, and welcome to the other side!  See?  Education, when taught honestly, works!

There IS NO evidence to support man-made global warming, that's just it!  Al Gore's movie was fiction.

Answer 9

NO S_IT ! Where have you been?

By RICHARD S. LINDZEN

The Wall Street Journal, 26 June 2006

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient

Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting

ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and

stronger hurricanes and invasions of tropical disease,

among other cataclysms -- unless we change the way we

live now.

Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr.

Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events

show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global

warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of

President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why

not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the

scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview

with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been

followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate

that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a

scientific community that is debating all these issues

and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a

thing being over, it has never been clear to me what

this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek

featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was

claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically

thereafter it was revealed that although there had

been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists

did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his

statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it,

clarifying things in an important way. When Mr.

Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that

the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less

dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended

his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any

models that give them a high level of confidence" one

way or the other and went on to claim -- in his

defense -- that scientists "don't know. They just

don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the

"consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the

evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred

global-warming template -- namely, shrill alarmism. To

believe it requires that one ignore the truly

inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea

levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or

warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since

time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests

that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on

average. A likely result of all this is increased

pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that

country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's

movie. In the absence of factual context, these images

are perhaps dire or

alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been

retreating since the early 19th century, and were

advancing for several centuries before that. Since

about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped

retreating and some are now advancing again. And,

frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare

scenario are predicated on similar oversights.

Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once

common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in

Siberia -- mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth.

Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales;

sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important

factor. This temperature, itself, varies on

multidecadal time scales. However, questions

concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface

temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane

intensity are being hotly argued within the

profession.

Even among those arguing, there is general agreement

that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to

global warming. To be sure, there is one exception,

Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric

Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be

global warming because he can't think of anything

else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude,

are becoming rather common in climate assessments,

such claims, given the primitive state of weather and

climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to

assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its

climate are dynamic; they are always changing even

without any external forcing. To treat all change as

something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to

exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these

items are clearly not issues over which debate is

ended -- at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is

provided by the environmental journalist Gregg

Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific

community now agrees that significant warming is

occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human

influences on the climate system. This is still a most

peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been

widely contested. Most of the climate community has

agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have

increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over

the past century, having risen significantly from

about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the

early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and

remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of

carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about

280 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in the 19th

century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has

been no question whatsoever that carbon dioxide is an

infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas -- albeit a

minor one), and its increase should theoretically

contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept

equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led

to somewhat more warming than has been observed,

assuming that the small observed increase was in fact

due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural

fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause

for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an

intense effort to claim that the theoretically

expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide

has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal

variability of climate change, this task is currently

impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent

effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising

impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the

affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of

the Intergovernmental

Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the infamous "summary

for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The

balance of evidence suggests a discernible human

influence on global climate." This sufficed as the

smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems

surrounding what has become known as the attribution

issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are

responsible for observed changes in climate. Some

deployed the lassitude argument -- e.g., we can't

think of an alternative -- to support human

attribution. But the "summary for policy makers"

claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual

text of the report that "In the light of new evidence

and taking into account the remaining uncertainties,

most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is

likely to have been due to the increase in

greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences

issued a brief (15-page) report responding to

questions from the White House. It again enumerated

the difficulties with attribution, but again the

report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously

claimed that "The changes observed over the last

several decades are likely mostly due to human

activities, but we cannot rule out that some

significant part of these changes is also a reflection

of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's

Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the

report represented a "unanimous decision that global

warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man.

There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the

social scientist [Naomi] Oreskes claimed that a search

of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years

1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate

change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts

supported what she referred to as the consensus view.

A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her

procedure and found that only 905 of the 928 articles

had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the

remaining 905 explicitly endorsed the so-called

consensus view. Several actually

opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science

Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency

for global-warming research, declared it had found

"clear evidence of human influences on the climate

system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case

closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models

imply that greenhouse warming should impact

atmospheric temperatures more than surface

temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming

in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that

selective corrections to the atmospheric data could

lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict

between observations and models descriptions of what

greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me,

means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate?

I would suggest at least three points.

First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother

with understanding the science. Claims of consensus

relieve policy types, environmental advocates and

politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also

Answer 10

Read this article published this morning on yahoo news. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/26...

now-.-- how curious is that the north pole ice is going to completely melt this summer? for the first time in human history... ?

Answer 11

You seem to have only gotten part of the picture in class.

Did your instructors also inform you that in response to the controversy surrounding the Mann paper, Congress tasked the National Academy of Sciences to do a survey of the science of temperature reconstructions?  And did they tell you the NAS had the following to say about Mann's paper?

http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record...

"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years."

Another independent review of Mann's paper was done by 2 respected scientists.  They concluded:

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/mille...

"Our examination does suggest that a slight modification to the original Mann et al. reconstruction is justifiable for the first half of the 15th century (~ +0.05°), which leaves entirely unaltered the primary conclusion of Mann et al. (as well as many other reconstructions) that both the 20th century upward trend and high late-20th century hemispheric surface temperatures are anomalous over at least the last 600 years."

There was indeed a mistake in Mann's reconstruction. There are probably mistakes in every science paper, but that doesn't mean everything in the paper is wrong. Mann's error was slight and had virtually no effect on the primary conclusion of the paper. If your instructors didn't inform you of the above, then they must be uninformed about the details of the subject. In any case, they seem to have mislead you.

Here's another very recent independent reconstruction that agreed with Mann:

Millennial temperature reconstruction intercomparison and evaluation

http://www.clim-past.net/3/591/2007/cp-3...

"The IPCC2001 conclusion that temperatures of the past millennium are unlikely to have been as warm, at any time prior to the 20th century, as the last decades of the 20th century is supported by subsequent research and by the results obtained here."

Claiming that NASA retracted their data is also misleading. Did your instructors inform you that it made a very minor difference for just a couple years in US (only) temperatures and was completely insignificant for the global temperature record (on the order of 1/1000th of a degree).  Here's the US chart:

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

Here's the global chart:

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

Answer 12

Have a look at this lovely gem of an article.

http://www.thelocal.se/12580/

This just proves my point that Environmentalism is a fanatical religion! I am a Conservationist! I believe in taking care of the Earth because it is beautiful and we need it to survive!

Answer 13

I'm pulling rank on you all. I graduated from Caltech nearly 40 years ago and took the first courses ever offered in environmental science. The information about the warming of our planet was controversial then and it still is controversial. I incorporated it into my masters degree on limited world as energy supplies of the future. The graphical presentations, in particular the vertical axis of temperature is usually expanded while the horizontal time axis is compressed to fit the global warming model. This way it will present to the layman more dramatically as a steeper and more compelling and important graph of data. Data and information are NOT the same.

I refer any global warming advocates and non-advocates to read :

Our Atmosphere: The view from Above

by Eric J. Fetzer

which is linked in the source below. These younger scientists are really doing it correctly. They are NOT scaring people into a political mind-set like so many of you have been since the media started sleeping with the Democrats and the large Hollywood film studios (ABC owned by Disney; CBS-Paramount; NBC-Universal; Fox-20th C.Fox). Ever wonder why Gore got an Academy Award?

And I would not have a lot of faith in NOAA. After all they predicted 18-19 Atlantic Ocean hurricanes last year and a similar amount for 2006. They were dead off. They revised  and revised. We had half that number. They really are a bunch of administrators that have to make committee decisions and abide by upper level management decisions which are often wrong. Look at what happened to the Space Shuttle Challenger & Columbia  because of that.

As far as the IPCC report on Climate Change, this report is WORDED VERY CAREFULLY! It is often cited because of its political connection and ONLY THAT.  It says almost NOTHING that is means anything scientifically TRUE, It does say certain nations take certain sides on certain political issues.

If the maps are too small to read (like the yahoo article ONE scientist GUESSES about the polar ice caps 50/50 chance), if the data is not readable, if it sounds like its doomsday don't believe it.

Answer 14

And for you star trek fans--- here is the latest from Jupiter------- right now-- not last year or last decade-- strange WARMING as much as 10 degrees Celsius-- creating new giant storms --

http://www.astromart.com/news/news.asp?n...

Answer 15

Well, the class was obviously biased in some way.  There is tons of data on global warming.  Some is accurate, some has been recanted.  If it was good enough for the IPCC and NAS, but not good enough for your professor, then something is definitely wrong.

Just wondering, was this class taught by scientists or political studies people?