The Global warming myth! Why do people believe in it?

Question

I remember when I was a kid. Everyone was talking about the Mad Cow disease. Scientists said it could be a new world plauge? People boycotted McDonalds?

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

To this day it has killed 13 people world wide! Why are people so d**n dumb and talk about global warming cause Al Gore made a movie about it?

Answer 1

Because educated people listen to scientists.

To take your example: the reason why mad cow disease never became a major problem is that intelligent people listened to the the scientists and took preventative measures. So they stopped the problem before it became serious.

In other words--all your example shows  is the value of taking the science seriously.

Global warming is caused by humans--and itis serious.  That's not a matter of "belief." It s knowledge versus ignorance.

Answer 2

Are you kidding?!  I guess you wil be roven wrong in some years when towns start to be flooded.  its the ignorance of people like you who have gotten us into this mess!

Answer 3

It cracks me up when a paranoid, uneducated person asks a question like this on yahoo answers. There are generally two types of answer. One being the 'yeah your right al gore is an idiot' and secondly the other type is a well thought out,  articulate response that totally disproves what ever wild theory the person was trying to support.

  Someone above me mentioned the following facts to show that we blow things out of proportion "Nuclear war, nuclear winter, nuclear meltdown, Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, SARS, Avian Flu, AIDS, Flu pandemics, killer bees, mad cows, Y2K, area 51, Hale-Bopp, overpopulation"

  Which is one of the most ridiculous stretches of reality I have ever read on yahoo answers. (how the person became a top contributor I will never know)  Nearly all of these situations have been protested against and prevented by educated and concerned people. If they had been ignored we would not be in the situation we are in now. Aside from Area51which is the stuff from movies.

   You are obviously not really 'in the picture' or 'up to speed'

with this one but people believe in global warming because it is a fact.

*EDIT* The thing that I dont understand is why so many educated and intelligent people take the time out of their busy lives to try to debate a point like this with someone who is obviously not going to change their mind and will probably not read the answers and defintly not read the links and will understand neither. You should be gratefull to these people and try to learn something.

Answer 4

No, friend, we old folks were taught about global warming and cooling as part of university courses 30 and more years before Inconvenient truth was released. Al Gore is a latecomer on the scene.

Why people believe? There is some compelling evidence, and the decision to ignore it looks too irresponsible. We need to do the same thing to preserve our fossil fuels, so we can not see a point in drawing too fine a line, calling for conclusive proof when there is a preponderance of evidence.

Answer 5

I guess when the evidence overwhelming supports something, when common sense supports it, and all people knowledgable in the field support it, it is hard to disagree.

Only a total idiot would believe a paid political hack over the entire scientific community. Unfortunately for Moble/Exxon and the Republican party, most people are not total idiots.

Answer 6

I do now know, I have been doing much scientific research on the subject of global warming and I have come to the conclusion that global warming is not really as big of a threat as most would believe.

Answer 7

It's a liberal tact and like the others,its conception is to impose  more restrictions  and  taxes ,amass wealth and clout for their inner circle.

Answer 8

I wish I *knew* why some people are "so d**n dumb!"

A few points for your education:

-People were talking about global warming before you were *born*.  By assuming it started with Al Gore, you are revealing how unqualified you are to speak on this subject.

-Your supporting evidence for your global warming argument is a link to an article about Bovine spongiform encephalopathy?  {laughing}  From Wikipedia??  Tip: Providing *relevant* evidence helps to avoid looking dumb.

-There is no such word as "plauge."  You apparently put as much care into checking your spelling as into checking your facts.

In answer to your question, *educated* people believe it because a lot of science supports it.  There is no question that it's happened and happening, and quite a lot of evidence that humans have accelerated the once-natural process.  I'd give you a bunch of links to science-oriented articles, but you clearly will not read them.  Thinking hurts some people.

There's nothing wrong with being young, and to an extent, nothing wrong with being uneducated.  But being uneducated and cocky is a repulsive trait.

Answer 9

Your logic makes no sense at all.  It's like saying 'an airplane crashed in Sri Lanka a month ago so now my computer is going to explode.'  What does one thing have to do with the other?

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 10

Actually, you're "d**n dumb" label should more properly be applied to the people that haven't read any of the science supporting AGW.  It was well understood and accepted by the vast majority of climate scientists way before Al Gore's movie.  His movie is nothing more than a red herring for people who don't like him and have a political agenda, it doesn't affect the scientific journal articles at all.

As for mad cow disease, the reason it has ONLY killed 13 people (your own link says it's killed 165 in Britain alone, don't you read your own links?) is because we have taken the problem seriously and react strongly whenever an outbreak occurs.  If governments sat around and thought "we really don't know how many people could die from mad cow disease, so let's do nothing until every scientist in the world agrees", the number dead would be a whole lot larger than 13 (or whatever the actual number is).

Joe - How many scientific peer-reviewed journals do you regularly read?  I'll guess 0.  I read 4 or 5 different ones on a regular basis.  You see, it's not THAT you read, which makes a person intelligent and knowledgeable, but it's WHAT you read.

Answer 11

It has nothing to do with Al Gore or his movie.

There is an enormous quantity of scientific research that led to the current understanding of global warming.  The history is summarized in detail on this site:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.h...

Here's roughly how scientific opinion stands:

http://norvig.com/oreskes.html

The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.

Scientists would love to find evidence that we are off the hook, but there is no alternate theory that has any widespread support, because the evidence does not point in any reassuring directions.

The public however is led to believe that global warming is a myth by a very sophisticated and well funded effort underway to convince people of that.  It is very similar to the campaign used by the tobacco industry in the past:

http://www.nowpublic.com/whos_paid_to_de...

The material they create is accepted and broadcast by the news media:

At Fox News, a Pundit for Hire

http://www.freepress.net/news/print.php?...

"Objective viewers long ago realized that Fox News has a political agenda. But, when a pundit promotes this agenda while on the take from corporations that benefit from it, then Fox News has gone one disturbing step further"

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

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, documents how the media supports the false appearance of controversy on the topic of global warming:

http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/05...

Creating controversy where science finds consensus

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1978

"A new study has found that when it comes to U.S. media coverage of global warming , superficial balance—telling "both" sides of the story—can actually be a form of informational bias."

Media False Balancing Allowed Extreme Views to be Treated Same as Scientific Consensus

http://www.globalissues.org/EnvIssues/Gl...

Why would "news" programs do this?  At the end of the day they are entertainment businesses, motivated by profit.  Creating false controversy increases ratings, increasing advertising rates and revenue.

The primary myth present in the current discussion of global warming is the false appearance of confusion on the topic, created by special interests and promoted with the eager cooperation of the news media.

Answer 12

The 'people' believe because most are too non-energetic to do any reading on their own.  It's a lot easier to sit on one's duff and watch a movie than to read.

EDIT:

OK folks,  

you say that the global warming trend is not cyclical and that it is caused by the CO2 emitted by human technology.

You keep saying that anthropogenic global warming is backed by hard science.

To date, I have seen only theories and rhetoric.

I propose that AGW be treated with some science.

For your convenience, I have posted the steps of scientific method below:

identify the problem - a scientific problem to be solved

research - the process of collecting information and data about a topic being studied

hypothesis - an idea about the solution to a problem, based on knowledge and research

experimentation - the process of testing a hypothesis by collecting data under controlled, repeatable conditions

data analysis - organizing and examining the collected data using narratives, charts, graphs or tables

conclusion - a summary of the results of the experimentation and a statement of how the results relate to the hypothesis

According to the GW alarmists, the identification of a problem has been made, the research has been done, and the hypothesis has been postulated.

That puts us in the experimentation stage.  

I hereby propose the following:

To test the hypothesis that carbon dioxide is the leading cause of global warming,

....1) Give 10 years, not later than 2018AD, to _eliminate_ carbon dioxide emissions from all new technology sources. This means NO 'carbon offsets'..this is only a dispensation anyway as it results in NO reduction in total carbon output.

....2) Graph the resultant atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide against the planetary mean temperature until

at least 2048AD. (It did take about 30 years for the global cooling scare of the 1970's to morph into global warming)

....3) If such experimentation results in a cause/effect link between CO2 and mean global temperature, then the problem has been solved by the experiment.

If, however, you find the truth to be that the CO2 level is an _INDICATOR_, NOT A CAUSE of mean global temperature increase then you must accept that the climatic cycle is natural and humans have not and cannot affect it.

Answer 13

Talk about dumb...  Global warming isn't a myth, and neither was mad cow disease.  Read your own Wikipedia link -- it was confirmed that this disease killed people (165 in Britain, not 13, according to Wikipedia) and that it was linked with cows, so over 4 million cows were killed and extensive new controls were placed on the industry to save lives.  Global warming isn't a myth, although it's effects are sometimes mythologized -- it may not just be heat and higher water levels-- it might create different weather patterns, more severe storms, etc....  And the effects of our pollutionare fairly measurable in teh present, even if the exact look of the future might be a bit unpredictable.  

Moreover, global warming is seldom mentioned alone-- it is one of a plethora of human-caused environmental problems that could be reduced or eliminated if we were better stewards of the earth.  Pollution of the air, water and ground should probably bother you, given the quantifiable and qualifiable health problems that causes to people living in the U.S. and abroad.  People who are concerned about global warming are not dumb.  What is dumb is to deny or ignore the environmental degradation that we are causing.  Even if we come up with some marvelous technology that helps humans live in a polluted world, I, for one, would prefer to preserve the beautiful places and species we have on the earth already for future generations to enjoy.

Answer 14

People love the excitement of pending doom.  It gives them a thrill in their otherwise boring dull lives.

Nuclear war, nuclear winter, nuclear meltdown, Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, SARS, Avian Flu, AIDS, Flu pandemics, killer bees, mad cows, Y2K, area 51, Hale-Bopp, overpopulation, are only a few of the things that people were concerned about that were going to cause the end of mankind during my short lifetime.

In a couple of years so-called "global warming" will join the scrapyard heap of fear mongering as something else new will take its place as the next "the world is going to end" fear is realized.

Answer 15

You mean, all that we do with pollution, it WONT affect the planet at all? You believe that? lol. wow.  I guess  cigarettes are just like candy, too, huh?  Not bad in moderation. lol..

Answer 16

Global warming is not a myth. What planet are you living on? It is happening right before our eyes.

Answer 17

its not a myth

it's a fact

have you NOT noticed the climate change these last couple of years???

Answer 18

You are such an idiot! Obviously you are right and ALL the world's climate scientists are wrong huh? BSE has nothing to do with climate change. God you're so clueless

Answer 19

You are quite correct.  People are dumb if they talk about global warming simply because Al Gore made a movie (which was really a movie about a powerpoint presentation to boot).  

I thought people boycotted McDonald's because the hamburgers were made out of worms.  It was really because of BSE?  The things you learn here.

Answer 20

Just keep your eyes shut and it will all go away.  And - what does mad cow disease have to do with global climate change?