What are the two sides to global warming??

Question

okay for the most part, im doing a report on global warming. i need BOTH sides to the issue. 1) Global warming IS affecting our oceans 2) its NOT affecting our oceans. give me somthing i can work with. even a website would be helpful. its critcal that i get real answers from people who know who they are talking about. im in 8th grade....help =]

Answer 1

there are more then two sides on global warming

one group believes that global warming is caused by man

another group believes that global warming is not caused by man. so man can not stop it

another group does not believe in global warming.

and some people believe that global warming will be good for the world

Answer 2

Ocean levels are rising - that should clue some people in!!  

The general temperature of the earth is warming up and making us have more violent weather - storms, etc.  

Many plankton in the oceans are dying because it's too hot for them to survive in it...

I do know what I'm talking about - I'm the head of our Environmental Club at our school and I have studied this stuff for years.

What you need to do is watch ,"An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore - it tells you everything you need to know!!

Answer 3

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.

The global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 100 year period ending in 2005.[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations"[1] via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.[2][3] These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with the conclusions of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change are in agreement with the conclusions.[9][10]

Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the 21st century.[1] The range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a thousand years even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. The delay in reaching equilibrium is a result of the large heat capacity of the oceans.[1]

Increasing global temperature will cause sea level to rise, and is expected to increase the intensity of extreme weather events and to change the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.

Remaining scientific uncertainties include the amount of warming expected in the future, and how warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe. There is ongoing political and public debate worldwide regarding what, if any, action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and outside of the United States there is considerably less debate over the effects and uncertainties of global warming.

The term "global warming" is a specific example of climate change, which can also refer to global cooling. In common usage, the term refers to recent warming and implies a human influence.[11] The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) uses the term "climate change" for human-caused change, and "climate variability" for other changes.[12] The term "anthropogenic global warming" is sometimes used when focusing on human-induced changes.

The Earth's climate changes in response to external forcing, including variations in its orbit around the Sun (orbital forcing),[13][14][15] volcanic eruptions,[16] and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The detailed causes of the recent warming remain an active field of research, but the scientific consensus[17][18] identifies elevated levels of greenhouse gases due to human activity as the main influence. This attribution is clearest for the most recent 50 years, for which the most detailed data are available. Some other hypotheses departing from the consensus view have been suggested to explain the observed increase in mean global temperature. One such hypothesis proposes that warming may be the result of variations in solar activity.[19][20][21]

None of the effects of forcing are instantaneous. The thermal inertia of the Earth's oceans and slow responses of other indirect effects mean that the Earth's current climate is not in equilibrium with the forcing imposed. Climate commitment studies indicate that even if greenhouse gases were stabilized at 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) would still occur.[22]

The greenhouse effect was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. It is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by atmospheric gases warm a planet's atmosphere and surface.

Existence of the greenhouse effect as such is not disputed. Naturally occurring greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 °C (59 °F), without which Earth would be uninhabitable.[23][24] Rather, the issue is how the strength of the greenhouse effect is changed when human activity increases the atmospheric concentrations of some greenhouse gases.

On Earth, the major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36–70% of the greenhouse effect (not including clouds); carbon dioxide (CO2), which causes 9–26%; methane (CH4), which causes 4–9%; and ozone, which causes 3–7%.[25][26] Molecule for molecule, methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but its concentration is much smaller so that its total radiative forcing is only about a fourth of that from carbon dioxide. Some other naturally occurring gases contribute very small fractions of the greenhouse effect; one of these, nitrous oxide (N2O), is increasing in concentration owing to human activity such as agriculture. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4 have increased by 31% and 149% respectively since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s. These levels are considerably higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. From less direct geological evidence it is believed that CO2 values this high were last attained 20 million years ago.[27] Fossil fuel burning has produced about three-quarters of the increase in CO2 from human activity over the past 20 years. Most of the rest is due to land-use change, in particular deforestation.[28]

The present atmospheric concentration of CO2 is about 383 parts per million (ppm) by volume.[29] Future CO2 levels are expected to rise due to ongoing burning of fossil fuels and land-use change. The rate of rise will depend on uncertain economic, sociological, technological, and natural developments, but may be ultimately limited by the availability of fossil fuels. The IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios gives a wide range of future CO2 scenarios, ranging from 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100.[30] Fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to reach this level and continue emissions past 2100, if coal, tar sands or methane clathrates are extensively used.[31]

Answer 4

The gulf stream is a conveyor belt of warm water that controls the climates of several continents. When glaciers melt and empty into the ocean from the north, into the path of this conveyor belt of warm water, the climate is disrupted. The colder air that is essentially locked in the Arctic will flow southward and freeze Europe and North America. You will no longer be able to grow crops in the midwest. This area is known as "the world's bread basket" because a lot of corn and other essential crops are grown there to feed our cattle, supply our grocery stores and is now being used to produce ethanol (an alternative fuel source). A lot of other nations depend on the U.S. to provide them with our crops. The volume of ice and ice melt entering our oceans would also cause our ocean levels to rise. This rising water would cover our existing coastlines and bury many islands.

Answer 5

The oceans are affecting global cooling [study the evaporation cycle and subsea volcanic activity]

Answer 6

Nova has a special about a super volcano that happened about 75,000 BC.  It raised the temperatures of the oceans 12 degrees Celsius, and put so much sulfuric acid into the upper atmosphere that it started an ICE AGE.  It was colossally worse than the highly extrapolated (and therefore statistically questionable) predictions of "warming" and the earth recovered just fine.

The softer, much more qualitative, sciences like long-term climate studies, and paleontology are being presented as if they have the same kind of rigor and credibility as chemistry, or mechanics and its just not true.  It is not even known if its provable that solutions to the governing equations for meteorology are even valid - they might not be.  Navier Stokes is still an unsolved million-dollar prize from the clay institute of mathematics.  Weather-guessers can barely predict with accuracy what will happen in a week - accurate prediction about centuries from now is an exercise in error.  Modern methods are simply not applicable - there is no reasonable way to do it thats anything better than a giant random guess.

There are trillions of dollars of money at stake.  The futures prophesied by the scientific prophets of Global warming justify both taxation and spending that is immense.  Its trillions of dollars over decades.  There is immense financial incentive that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether large-scale climate change is real.  That makes the issue political, and therefore questionable.

Answer 7

There really aren't two sides.  There is some disagreement about how much and how fast but the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and its main cause is the production of greenhouse gsews through burning fossil fuels and deforestation (forests help reduce the carbon dioxide, though the last time this happened, from vulcanism, back in the age of the dinosaurs, it was a little fern that took out the excess carbon (in about a million years).  Core samples in the arctic ocean show that its mean temperature in the dinosaur age was about 70 F.

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page... is a good place to look.  It talks about myths and who is funding bad science to support profit.

There is a time bomb in all of this.  I lived in the arctic until recently, and I watched more than 1000 new lakes of 20 acres or more appear in the last 10 years, in a 20,000 square mile area.  Some scientists have calculated from random sampling of tundra permafrost in Alaska, Canada and Siberia, that if the permafrost melts it will release 80 times as much greenhouse gases as our industrial uses have done, and that may happen in as short a time span as 50 years.  It took us about 150 years of industrial uses of fossil fuels to more than double the CO2 in the atmosphere.  Imagine what the melting permafrost could do?

Sea level rise?  Between 8 and 30 meters, most say.  The debate is about how long it will take.  We are already able to observe an increase, and the polar icecaps are diminishing.  The arctic cap is meaningless, because the ic is already in the water, so no net change in level will come from it though it is retreating at 8% per decade for the past two decades nd the retreat seems to be increasing.  Most of that mass of water is in Antarctica and the movement of that amount of mass away from the axis of rotation could affect the length of the day and possibly cause an increase in vulcanism.

Vulcanism could add to the greenhouse or tke away from it.  If the surge blows rock dust into the upper atmosphere, then it may cause  a lessening of insolation (heating from sunshine) and counter some of the warming.

But right now, Tuvalu is about a meter above sea level, and the residents are worried about losing their home.  http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/rough/...   will tell you more, and the author is a Fulbright Scholar as well as a competent journalist nd cites plenty of scientific sources.

The idea that there are two sides to global warming is hardly defensible.  It is happening.  How long is the question, and how severe is the other.

Answer 8

Alright.  Eighth grade is young to understand everything about global warming but here is a shot.  Global warming causes three things that affect the ocean.  

1 - The poles are covered in ice and as the earth's temperature rises, the ice melts.  This ice enters the ocean as water.  When the extra water gets in the ocean the ocean temperature rises.  Try looking up 'polar ice cap melt' online.

2 - When water gets warm it expands.  Think about a helium mylar balloon ( like a birthday ballon, the shiny ones you get at the store that have helium in them).  When you take it outside in the cold, it shrivels up because the air inside contracts.  When you take it back in where it is warm it fills back up because the air expands.  Same thing happens with water.  Try looking up 'temperature affects on water' online.

3 - Global warming is caused by several chemicals that get released into the air.  Some of these chemicals are acids when they are mixed with water.  Just like acid rain, these chemicals enter the ocean and increase the acidity in the ocean.  Try looking up 'acid rain' or 'ocean acidity' online.

I'm not sure how to argue that global warming does not affect the oceans.  Possibly by looking at 'short term ocean cooling' online or 'ocean currents' online.

www.actionbioscience.org/environment/c...