What are your opinions on global warming?

Question

I personally think that it could only happen if God willed it to, and if it is happening, there's nothing we can do about it.

Answer 1

Simply amazing that so many people believe some kind of joint conspiracy, to create a "hoax" about global warming. Or the motives of all scientists, as self serving. Or the private and independent research teams who use their own funding. Or National Geographic has been "duped" into this falsehood.

Whatever. I hope their right and I'm wrong. However, some have accepted the inevitable and are making plans to protect families. And in this case, an ounce of my prevention is worth 100 pounds of their cure.

And these are the same people who will be banging on our doors for food and water. Such is life.

Answer 2

It's a fact, now what shall we do about it.....

Answer 3

The following is a hit with me:

Nature, not man, is to blame, Gore critic insists

By Steve Lyttle

McClatchy Newspapers

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — One of the world's foremost meteorologists Friday called the theory that helped Al Gore win a share of the Nobel Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works."

William Gray, a pioneer in the science of seasonal hurricane forecasts, spoke to a packed lecture hall at UNC Charlotte and said humans are not responsible for the warming of the Earth.

His visit, arranged through the meteorology program at the university, came on the same day that Gore was honored for his work in support of the link between humans and global warming.

"We're brainwashing our children," said Gray, 78, a professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie ('An Inconvenient Truth') and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

Gray, whose annual forecasts of the number of tropical storms and hurricanes are widely publicized, said instead that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures — related to the amount of salt in ocean water — is responsible for the global warming that he acknowledges has taken place.

However, he said, that same cycle means a period of global cooling will begin soon and last for several years.

"We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realize how foolish it was," Gray said.

He cited statistics, showing there were 101 hurricanes from 1900-1949, in a period of cooler global temperatures, compared to 83 from 1957-2006, when the Earth warmed.

"The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Gray said.

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

Answer 4

I think we do have a slight warming trend. A warming trend is actually better for crop production that a cooling trend. We're talking about a few degrees over more than a hundred years. I do not think human activity has a great impact on this trend and therefore believe that our resources would be better spent in finding ways do benefit from the warming trend.

Answer 5

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.