Is global warming caused by pollution, or is it just an earthly climate cycle?

Question

Evidence or proof would be awesome. Thanks!

Answer 1

Even if it WAS just an earthly climate cycle, recent changes we are witnessing is out of ordinary. I don't think putting up so much CO2 and other toxic gases would not help. Don't you think so? Isn't it better to take precautionary measures rather than just to ignore saying it is a natural cycle.

Answer 2

Are you open to an answer that it is both?

Global warming and cooling has drivers that do not depend on human activity and some that depend on it.

Anthropomorphic Global warming (AGW) by contrast has only human causes. That is by definition. AGW  has a secondary heating effect, in that rising temperatures tend to reduce cloud cover, hence reduce reflectivity. Anything that causes temperatures to increase will result in this effect.  from the middle of the last major ice age, there was a rising temperature pattern that caused major desert formation.

Odd as it may seem, desert formation causes an increase in global temperatures. So warming, however caused, becomes the cause of desert formation which causes warming. Warming causes the air to hold more water vapor, so cause more warming. Warming causes ice caps tjh shrink, giving less reflectivity, so more warming.

What I am describing is a self sustaining warming cycle that starts with whatever cause an initial warming, as in an increase in CO2.

If that warming period be sustained, it will continue to enhance its effect, and this is not dependent on what caused the start of the warming period. So, once we kick of global warming, it may not stop of its own. It might stop because of some event like a lot of volcanic activity. It might stop because a lot of ice melt water cools the ocean surfaces. But we can not say with confidence that removing the original cause of warming will stop the global warming cycle. It is this that makes it a time dependent issue to get the AGW under control.

Answer 3

We are experiencing record setting heat nearly every single year.  The reason for this change is that the earth and the seas have become warmer.  On investigation, scientists have found that the increased heat is due to certain gases which are caused by factories, cars, etc.

Answer 4

The absence of sunspots has left some scientists scratching their heads about what could be next.

Extremely low sunspot activity and extended periods of no sunspot activity have some scientists wondering how this could affect the weather on Earth. There has been a coincidence over the centuries of an absence of sunspots correlating with very cold temperatures, and a presence of sunspots corresponding to warm periods.

Over 1,000 years ago during the medieval warm period there was increased sunspot activity, and then that activity slowed down as Earth entered the Little Ice Age of the late 1700s to mid-1800s. During the last century, the sun had increased sunspot activity, which correlated with a period of warming.

After the current warming that we had in the 1900s, the sunspots have diminished. And that's one reason that we are headed for a cooling period, NOT warming.

Other reasons are that in the last decade temperatures have leveled off, and in the last year they dropped. Temperatures have dropped by more than a half a degree centigrade, which is equivalent to more than a century's worth of warming.

Answer 5

It's most likely a SOLAR climate cycle. The sun produces sunspots in cycles. The easy cycle to follow is the 11 year cycle, but there are much longer cycles as well.

Answer 6

Global warming is caused becuase the Earth is getting to hot...so yeah pollution?i think

Answer 7

Well, since the earth has gone through a number of ice ages and warmings for millions of years with no people around at all, I'd call it a natural cycle.

Answer 8

It's both. But here's a fact for you: We can't reverse it. We can only slow it down.

Answer 9

Earthly climate cycle.

Answer 10

Pollution (airborne) will cause acid rain.  That's not related to global warming though.

I'd say it's climatic, when it happens.  The earth hasn't warmed anywhere in the past 10 years.  Before that, the previous 100 years warmed us by .6 of one degree, most of that in the first 40 years.

Answer 11

caused by

pollution

oil waste

carbon monoxide

car fumes

Answer 12

There is currently no evidence that man has made any significant contribution to climate change.

Some interesting facts.

1. During most of the past 2,000 years, the temp has been about the same or higher. Currently, we are barely over the average for the last 2,000 years.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index....

2. During the medieval warm period (820 – 1040 AD), Greenland supported farming. Those areas previously farmed are now covered in glaciers. Obviously the melting and reformation of glaciers is a cyclical occurrence.

3. The earth experienced a little ice age which ended around the late 1860's or so. This is about the time man started recording temperatures. This would be like measuring a lake depth after a severe drought, then worrying about it flooding as it rose to normal levels.

4. The earth has been warming for the last 18,000 years, since the last major glacier time period. During this time frame, the glaciers have been melting at a fairly consistent rate. Also, for most of the last 1 billion years, the earth had NO glaciers or ice coverage.

http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/i...

5. The AGW theory states that CO2 is the primary driver of temperature. They arrived at this idea because they did not know of anything else which could cause it. But during the 70's and during the current decade, temperatures dropped while CO2 continued to rise. This means that natural occurrences are driving temp, not CO2.

6. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and sun spots provides a much better correlation to earths' temperature than CO2 levels ever have.

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/200...

http://motls.blogspot.com/2004/09/sunspo...

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_r...

7. Polar Bears are experiencing a population boom. Coke sales in the arctics are through the roof. Polar Bears have been around for thousands of years, and remember, we are only at the average for the last 2,000 years. They lived through all the previously warmer climates.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/...

8. Many glaciers are expanding. Even Antarctica is growing on 98% of is land mass. Only 2% is melting.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1...

9. There is no consensus on AGW. This was a lie that has been propagated by the media.

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckt...

10. Yes we emit CO2 into the atmosphere and it is a greenhouse gas, but, we only contribute about .28% of all the greenhouse effect. Water vapor makes up about 95% of the greenhouse effect. CO2 and other trace gases round out the greenhouse gases at about 5% for all of them. Of that 5%, only 3% is CO2, and most of that is natural. Again, our contribution to the greenhouse effect is a paltry .28%

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenh...

11. The spread of disease is not attributed mainly to temperature. If this were the case, Florida would be a giant festering disease ridden cesspool. Economic standing is the primary determining factor in the spread of disease. Poor cultures can not fight the disease or eradicate the pests like more successful nations.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12077886...

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.h...

12. Natural climate disasters (hurricanes, cyclones, etc) have never been scientifically linked to global warming (whether natural or man made).

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppa...

http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?i...

Answer 13

It's a combination of both, actually. But it's more complicated than that you should do some research. best of luck.

Answer 14

I noticed no other posters gave links. I'd be happy to start.

The past 30 years has been marked by almost constant warming, going by the 5 year average:

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

Notice how, in times prior to the 70's, warming/cooling trends almost never lasted greater than about 10,15 years.

Skeptics claim all of the warming can be attributed to solar output variations, namely sunspots. This is almost impossible. The sun goes through 11.3 year cycles. Every eleven years the temperature anomaly should disappear, followed by a drastic temperature upsurge within the next six. We haven't seen this.

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

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

So we know the sun can't be the major factor behind the temperature anomaly. (You may hear skeptics on this site say so, but only because they're uninformed. Some professional skeptics postulate the sun is behind 30% of the warming, but no more than 30%, most don't go above 15%, in fact). So what is? Plotting variations of the different factors which influence climate, you have this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en...

Obviously CO2 vs. Temperature correlates the best.

Immediately before the Industrial Revolution, CO2 levels were at a high point, ~275

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

Man made emissions increased that level to 384:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

As you can see in the second to last link, never before have CO2 levels been this high.

We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We know increasing levels of CO2 will increase the greenhouse effect.

By the way, temperature readings of years past aren't guesses, like skeptics say. Ice core samples and proxy models can be very, very accurate.

Answer 15

For those of you who are Warmers, here's yet another possible cause of your man-did-it global warming ..... from the New York Times:

"FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and they should just quit.

Then we said they were repulsive and we didn’t want to be around them. Then we said they were costing us loads of money — maybe they should pay extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people cause global warming.

This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990’s, is 350 million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon dioxide."

Now this makes more sense than anything that Gore & Company have spewed over the years!!

Answer 16

It is actually both.  According to the IPCC the equation for since 1960 carbon is 6.3 * lN(385/315) =1.26 W/M^2

That = a delta T of .28 deg C.  We have seen about a .6 deg C.  By the way the more CO2 we get the less of empact it has.

Bye the way from 1910 to 1940 we had an increase of .6 deg C.  That goes from Using the same carbon equation from above the most carbon could rais that was less .03 deg C as carbon rose from 293-300.  That 30 year cycle looks alot like the one beginning in the 60's.

Answer 17

global warming occurs naturally and maintains the temperature of the world so that it can be habitable.. but it's being increased by pollution and u know that everything in excess is bad..

hope is useful to u

byee