Opinions on global warming anyone?

Question

Just wanted to say, that year 2005 was apparently the hottest year of the millennium, and National Glacier Park estimates that all of their glaciers will be melted away by year 2030 :P

Answer 1

i think global warming is a myth the earth is billions of years old and people have only stufying weather patterns for a couple of years whose to say this isn't just another of the earths weather cycles.

Answer 2

You make a really good point!  I'd never though to explain the slight cooling that way before, but I have never for a second though global warming was over.  Anyone who says it is over doesn't know anything about the climate and the way CO2 affects the atmosphere.  GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL, PEOPLE!  WAKE UP!  IT'S HERE, AND IT'S GONNA GET YA!  JUST BECAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO FEEL GUILTY AS YOU DRIVE YOUR SUPERSIZED SUV TO WORK EVERY DAY DOESN'T MEAN YOU AREN'T HURTING OTHERS!  SO WAKE UP AND FACE THE TRUTH!  IF YOU SAY IT ISN'T HAPPENING, IT DOESN'T MAKE IT GO AWAY!

Answer 3

Global Warming is true, there are Natural fazes but we are affecting that to a great extent ,with deforestation ,desertification and pollution., especially air pollution.

A few weeks ago one of NASA's top scientists concluded that the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free within five years, much faster than all previous predictions.

when the north pole is gone , you may have polar bears soon in America ,looking for a home ,

Calculations do not include the accumulative ,speeding up ,factor with time. the increase in water temperature will get faster all the time as well as the melting, when the ice is all gone the deeper cold Ocean currents will be drastically affected,which in turn will affect the warm currents,since all moving bodies of water are connected in series.

This will affect coastal climates ,world wide ,almost instantly. All aquatic flora and fauna will be affected,many dying off and others becoming invasive,

And recently In Chiapas ,and Tabasco in Mexico .more then a million people became homeless overnight with water coming up to their roofs ,because of rains from super evaporation from the forests,this had never happened before. Millions of animals died.

In India 3000 people died because of super storms .

.A few years ago in Europe 3500 people,died during a heat wave ,many of them in France .

Right now the average death toll annually is 150.000 due to Global warming

. these figures are already out of date and are expected to double soon.

In Northern China millions of people are running for their lives because regular dust storms so far have buried 900 villages under the sand and the whole of northern China is turning into a dessert.

The Sahara is growing by 7 kilometers a year all around the edges ,like a slow burning fire shriveling up their neighbors In the Kalahari huge rivers have dried up and thousand of species are gone due to their habitats disappearing .

The biggest changes are invisible at micro biotic levels species are becoming extinct ,others are multiplying ,

This affects the insect populations that follow ,and changes in that ,affect all that follows in the food chains ,

All life is interrelated of both flora and fauna, And since we are on the top of the food chain ,

we are always the last to know.

So Global warming has its toll there are incidents all over the world ,

However

confusion rules the day ,i am beginning to think that SCIENCE HAS BEEN INVADED WITH POLITICS AND HUMAN EMOTIONS

The truth is being distorted at high levels,

And lies have been weaved in.

Some of the real dangers are being hidden because there are no solutions , Public could panic.and Authorities would loose control .

Besides Corporations have other priorities and changes will cause loss of profits ,this also affects the truths being published

Others facts are exaggerated so that the phenomena can be used to milk the people.

This is further complicated with Arrogance that will not admit that mankind could be guilty, or that Gods could be out of control ,unloving or incompetent

But I do not think we can make a real difference anymore to change the tide.

On a Global scale,Humanity is not co operative enough .

The poor regions have other priorities such as daily survival.

There is a lot we can do about being more responsible with what we got ,

In the first world countries many do not care or are more interested in Global Control than Global Warming.

Answer 4

There are many basic scientific facts which can only be explained if the current global warming is being caused by an increased greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from humans burning fossil fuels.

For example, the planet is warming as much or more during the night than day.  If the warming were due to the Sun, the planet should warm a lot more during the day when the Sun has influence.  Greenhouse gases trap heat all the time, so they warm the planet regardless of time of day.  Another example is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because the greenhouse gases trap the heat in the lower atmosphere.  If warming were due to the Sun, it would be warming all layers of the atmosphere.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

We know it's warming, and we've measured how much:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science...

Scientists have a good idea how the Sun and the Earth's natural cycles and volcanoes and all those natural effects change the global climate, so they've gone back and checked to see if they could be responsible for the current global warming.  What they found is:

Over the past 30 years, all solar effects on the global climate have been in the direction of (slight) cooling, not warming.  This is during a very rapid period of global warming.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/62902...

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/pro...

A recent study concluded:

“the range of  [Northern Hemisphere]-temperature reconstructions and natural forcing histories…constrain the natural contribution to 20th century warming to be <0.2°C [less than one-third of the total warming].  Anthropogenic forcing must account for the difference between a small natural temperature signal and the observed warming in the late 20th century.”

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104...

You can see this in the third graph here, where the dotted lines are just from natural causes, and the full lines are natural + human causes:

http://www.pnas.org/content/vol104/issue...

If that’s not enough to convince you the Sun isn’t responsible, consider the fact that no scientific study has ever attributed more than one-third of the warming over the past 30 years to the Sun, and most attribute just 0-10% to the Sun.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;...

So the Sun certainly isn't a large factor in the current warming.  They've also looked at natural cycles, and found that we should be in the middle of a cooling period right now.

"An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that 'Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitc...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ab...

So it's definitely not the Earth's natural cycles.  They looked at volcanoes, and found that

a) volcanoes cause more global cooling than warming, because the particles they emit block sunlight

b) humans emit over 150 times more CO2 than volcanoes annually

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man....

So it's certainly not due to volcanoes.  Then they looked at human greenhouse gas emissions.  We know how much atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased over the past 50 years:

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

And we know from isotope ratios that this increase is due entirely to human emissions from burning fossil fuels.  We know how much of a greenhouse effect these gases like carbon dioxide have, and the increase we've seen is enough to have caused almost all of the warming we've seen over the past 30 years (about 80-90%).  You can see a model of the various factors over the past century here:

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

This is enough evidence to convince almost all climate scientists that humans are the primary cause of the current global warming.

Answer 5

I do not think this is an opinion.  The earth is warming.  the question is whether it is natural (which is unlikely) or human impacted.

Answer 6

Well... according to this news article, global warming isn't going to be much of an issue: Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on.

No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

A compiled list of all the sources can be seen here.  The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down.

Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn't itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.

Let's hope those factors stop fast. Cold is more damaging than heat. The mean temperature of the planet is about 54 degrees. Humans -- and most of the crops and animals we depend on -- prefer a temperature closer to 70.

Historically, the warm periods such as the Medieval Climate Optimum were beneficial for civilization. Corresponding cooling events such as the Little Ice Age, though, were uniformly bad news.

Update 2/27: The graph for HadCRUT (above), as well as the linked graphs for RSS and UAH are generated month-to-month; the temperature declines span a full 12 months of data.  The linked GISS graph was graphed for the months of January only, due to a limitation in the plotting program.   Anthony Watts, who kindly provided the graphics, otherwise has no connection with the column.  The views and comments are those of the author only.

Actually, as a rebuttle to your correction to me, thats not necessarily true. if you know anything about climate changes youll be familiar with the other ice ages the earth experienced before greenhouses gases were even a thought to anyone and before people were even on the earth. the earth goes through regular climate changes ALL of the time, we may not have experienced any since written history but that means nothing considering the amount of time the earth has been around. its just nature. the earth gets hot then it gets cold. it happens. its been a law of science for decades. were going to have another ice age pretty soon and its going to have nothing to do with the "greenhouse effect." besides, the greenhouse effect is way overrated anyway. everyone knows that one volcano erruption causes wayyy more damage to the environment than any carbondioxide put off by hairspray/car etc. im not saying greenhouses gases aren't a problem, because they are. they are damaging the ozone layer which will eventually be a pretty big problem. but the fact remains that there was already natural causes of damage to the ozone layer. and honestly id rather a hotter climate change happen than a colder one. If you read the article i posted you would also notice that it mentions that there are MORE ice burgs in the oceans than before, that wouldn't be caused by the polar caps melting.

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Ok, I seriously doubt that you have spent even a fraction of the time I have researching this subject. I have literally spent years researching this particular subject, considering I have a B.S in environmental sciences and am currently working on a PHd. My whole dissertation was about this subject actually... and honestly global warming isn't changing that much about the earth except the amount of UV rays that are getting through the Ozone. The earth would benefit from a warmer climate, but as I have said before, we are due to have an ice age any time now, we are actually overdue for one. But as I was saying, and this isn't just some conspiracy theory of mine, the certain politicians are hyping up the whole "geenhouse gas,"  especially the liberal ones, to distract a lot of citizens from real issues. In reality we have a lot of bigger problems we need to be facing. by the year 2030 we are also going to be in danger of being hit by a giant comet. blah.

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Its true. Look into it. It is supposed to first pass the earth in 2027 and then pass again much closer in 7 years. The  comets name is 2007 TU24.

Answer 7

I'd say we're f**cked.

By 2100, the world will be a vast, overheated

desert except at the poles, where a few breeding

pairs of people will eke out a Stone Age existence.

And this situation may last for 100,000 years or

better. (Long enough to forget all about how we once

flew to the moon; pondered quantum physics; had the

Internet, ect. We are going to go back to the

animal-like existence of our earliest ancestors. I

wonder if we'll still be walking upright when all is

said and done?)

Google "James Lovelock+global warming" and

see what I'm talking about.

I'm sure glad I never had any kids, that's for

sure!!!

Answer 8

Try watching this

http://www.greatglobalwarmingswindle.com...

Answer 9

how can you deny it, we invent cars and electric and sudenly we have global warming . but of curse it has nothing to do with us, its natrull, it happens all the time, for no reason.

Answer 10

Its real. Polar ice caps are melting. There is scientific proof! If you don't believe in it, you are an idiot.