Since people are saying Global Warming isn't real...?

Question

What's next? The Greenhouse effect is a load of lies too.

What has the world come to?

Answer 1

The greenhouse effect is real. Earth without an atmosphere would have a temperature of -18 degrees C (-0.4 F). But thanks to our atmosphere and the greenhouse effect, that temperature is raised to a habitable 15 degrees C (59 degrees F). The greenhouse effect works by trapping part of the solar energy we receive from the sun, and also allows some to be reflected back into space. “Global warming” therefore is the sum of this effect. There are several gases that make the greenhouse effect work – water vapor being far and away the greatest contributor, but also carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and some other trace gases.

What you are mostly hearing in the media though is not talking about this basic effect that keeps our planet livable, but an enhancement to this effect. Some believe this is being caused by humans (“anthropogenic” global warming – or AGW as you’ll see here frequently). However, the cause of greenhouse enhancement is widely disputed, with the AGW camp believing that human injected carbon dioxide is the primary cause and will bring about globally catastrophic temperature change.

Others citing the fact that the human contribution to the greenhouse effect is extremely small (<1%) and realizing that carbon dioxide is not the primary driver of the greenhouse effect, don’t think these catastrophic predictions are realistic They dispute the human cause citing historical natural cycles as a more likely explanation for modern warming.

You will have to do much more research to arrive at your own conclusion!

Answer 2

Most people believe global warming is real.  Some of do not ascribe the change to antropmorhic origins.  John Kerry voted against the Kyoto Treaty, and I'm with him.

Answer 3

Global warming is real!!! Check out those pictures of polar bears sitting on small and smaller ice patches.

Answer 4

Stop blaming everything on global warming. Tomorrow,you will burn your toast and blame it on global warming.  Did it occur to you that over the last 4 billion years our earth as waxed an wained between high temperatures and ice ages. It is a fact that the earth has been covered by at least 20 seperate ice ages with several thousand years between the ice ages.

Answer 5

well that Russian guy that jello keeps quoting denies the fact there is a greenhouse effect, but that same guy also claims that heat is lost by the earth mostly vire convection and not radiation.

Answer 6

They simply don't want to come to terms with it being real.  It's not for lack of available evidence.

Case in point: the "we don't the warming is anthropogenic" and "carbon dioxide is a weak greenhouse gas" answer in response to your question.

Here's one explanation:

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/07...

DENIAL MYTH #3: We don’t know for sure where the added CO2 in the atmosphere is coming from, but it’s not from human consumption of fossil fuels (Source: distillation of multiple people’s claims at Wikipedia.org).

Debunking: We know exactly where the added CO2 is coming from, and it most certainly is from human activity (mostly the burning of fossil fuels, but some is from industry and slash-and-burn deforestation for agriculture). Carbon has two stable isotopes (atomic weights), C12 and C13. Plants prefer to use C12 over C13 (it takes slightly less energy to bond to C12 than to C13), so the naturally occurring ratio of the two isotopes is skewed toward C12 in plants. All fossil fuels were originally plants, and so if the C12/C13 ratio in the atmosphere is changing toward increased concentrations of C12, then the source of the new CO2 must be plants. In addition, since animal respiration isn’t enough to skew the C12/C13 ratio and simultaneously affect the concentration of CO2 and oxygen in the atmosphere, the source must be fossil fuels. (sources: Environmental Chemistry.com’s CO2 Pollution and Global Warming page and IPCC Working Group 1 Report, Chapter 2, pages 138-139)

DENIAL MYTH #5: CO2 is a sufficiently weak greenhouse gas that it could not be responsible for the level of climate change being modeled and observed (Source: distillation of multiple people’s claims at Wikipedia.org).

Debunking: CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas compared to methane or nitrous oxide. If we use the radiative forcing (RF) values from Table 2.1 (page 141) of the IPCC Working Group 1 Report, Chapter 2 and assume a linear relationship between RF and concentration in the atmosphere, CO2 is about 0.0044 Watts per square meter per ppm (Wm-2ppm-1), compared to 0.2706 Wm-2ppm-1 for methane and 0.5016 Wm-2ppm-1 for nitrous oxide. This means that methane is about 62x as powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is about 114x as powerful as CO2. The problem is that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is measured at 379 ppm, while methane is only 1.774 ppm (1,774 ppb), and nitrous oxide is only .319 ppm (319 ppb). Because there is 213x more CO2 than methane, and 1188x more CO2 than nitrous oxide, the fact that CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas is more than compensated for by concentration in the atmosphere. See also myth #18 for a discussion of water vapor and CO2.

So much for those excuses.

Here's a more detailed explanation on the case for fossil fuels as the source for the increased CO2:

It becomes important to determine the source of the increase in CO2 from 280 to 380 parts per million by volume between 1800 and 2005.

Isotopes of carbon may hold a key to determining the source of the increased carbon in the atmosphere (4,5,7). The studies are based on the ratio of the three different carbon isotopes in atmospheric CO2. Carbon has three possible isotopes: C-12, C-13 and C-14. C-12, which has 6 neutrons, is by far the most prevalent carbon isotope and is a stable isotope. Carbon 13 is also a stable isotope, but plants prefer Carbon 12 and therefore photosynthetic CO2 (fossil fuel or wood fuels) is much lower in C-13 than CO2 that comes from other sources (e.g.: animal respiration) Carbon-14 is radioactive. Studies of carbon isotopes in CO2 has resulted in the following findings (5,7,8).

There has been a decline in the 14C/12C ratio in CO2 that parallels the increase in CO2. In 1950 a scientist named Suess discovered that fossils do not contain 14C because they are much older than 10 half lives of 14C.

There has been a parallel decline in 13C/12C ratio of atmospheric CO2. This has been linked to the fact that fossil fuels, forests and soil carbon come from photosynthetic carbon which is low in 13C. If the increased CO2 was due to warming of the oceans, there should not be a reduction in the ratios of C-13 and C-14 to C-12.

There are other clues that suggest the source of increased CO2 is not related to the warming of the ocean and subsequent release of CO2 from the ocean.

There has been a decline in the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere. If ocean warming was responsible for the CO2 increase, we should also observe an increase in atmospheric O2, because O2 is also released as the water is warmed.

The ocean is a sink for atmospheric carbon, and the carbon content of the oceans has increased by 118±19 PgC in the last 200 years. If the atmospheric CO2 was the result of oceans releasing CO2 to the atmosphere, the CO2 in the ocean should not be rising as a result of ocean warming.

There is still some resistance to the theory that the increase in CO2 results from the burning of fossil fuel, and that the increase in CO2 is responsible for global warming. There is little pressure on the US power plants to reduce CO2 emissions; so here it's still "Burning of fossil fuel is good for the environment" and "the world is flat."

http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/e...

I've posted this evidence countless times here and it's never once been refuted.  Dana also frequently asks for specific points to be countered with science and they aren't.  People in denial seem to be in denial simply to justify their own inaction.  The science, the overwhelming consensus of scientists, simply doesn't matter to them.  The enthusiasm with which skeptics object to the word "consensus" however reveals that it does matter.  Consensus is the process of considering alternative theories and rejecting the least supported ones.  By and large the skeptics' theories that tested anthropogenic global warming theory have been rejected.  That, along with improvement in models and continued measurement of warming, increasing greenhouse gasses, and observance of the symptoms (such as ice sheet melt) is why the confidence level in anthropogenic global warming has risen to over 90%.  Some people however will never choose to accept any level of confidence.  They'll embrace the scare tactics of the fossil fuel industries that tell them that the remedies will be too expensive.  Yeah, I'm still paying off the loan from the last time I bought aerosols or recharged my car air conditioner because replacing freon and CFCs was going to be too expensive and destroy world economies.  Denial propaganda embraces and promotes economic scare tactics, but then tell us that the entire problem is a scare tactic, some sort of "socialist plot".  It's pretty silly.

Answer 7

Yes, there is at least one denier who denies the greenhouse effect.

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

Voice's answer is puzzling, because he actually accepts the basic science.  But then he cites the wrong number, because humans have increased the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by 37%, not less than 1%.  The rest of his points (climate has changed in the past, etc.) are the typical meaningless denier arguments.

So to sum up, some deniers deny the basic science.  Others accept the basics, but deny the data (i.e. CO2 increase).  Others purposefully spread misinformation about the subject.