Where can i get information about the effects and causes of global warming?

Question

Where can i get information about the effects and causes of global warming?

Answer 1

An interesting solution is to watch the movie An Inconvenient Truth .It is an award winning documentary about global warming presented by former presented by former United States Vice President Al Gore and directed by Davis Guggenheim.

Answer 2

google.com and wikipedia.com

Answer 3

The Hadley Center for Atmospheric Research is the leading center for AGW study.  I would start there.

Answer 4

check out this site;

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

so good!

Answer 5

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...

Impacts of Global Warming

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/impac...

The upper end of the IPCC predictions call for 11 degrees F of change in the next 92 years, about a degree every 8.5 years.  In other words, soon we'll be seeing as much change in 8 years as we've observed in the past 100.  Aside from the direct damage to water supplies, crops, forests, the ocean, coastal cities, and the cumulative effects of all of that on global economies, things will be changing so fast we won't be able to predict what changes are coming next so we can adapt our agriculture, etc. to keep up.  

The truly scary thing is that many of the most informed scientists think the IPCC conclusions were far too optimistic, watered down by the political review.

NASA's take on possible worse-than-expected outcomes:

"Their study looked back over more than 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores and found evidence to suggest that rapid climate change over a period of centuries, or even decades, have in the past occurred once the world began to heat up and ice sheets started melting."

http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserve...

Here's how the chief scientist of the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Science Program summarizes the effort needed to minimize the damage and cost:

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/news/NationalPost...

Stephen Schwartz knows as much about the effects of aerosols on climate change as anyone in the world, and he's worried. He believes climate change is so massive an economic issue that we face costs "in the trillions if not quadrillions of dollars." He thinks a Herculean effort and great sacrifice is required to get the world down to zero net increase in carbon dioxide concentrations, an effort he compares to that which the Allies undertook in their all-out war against n**i Germany and Japan.  "Recall World War II, where everyone was making a sacrifice: gas rationing, tire rationing, no new car production, food rationing," he explains. "I don't think the people of the world are ready or prepared to make such a level of personal sacrifice. Perhaps when the consequences of climate change become more apparent that will change. But by that time, there will be irreversible changes in climate."

The odds of drought in the American Southwest (estimated $2B cost per year):

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazi...

Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas.  Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

More on the timing of the pending water and power crisis in the U.S. due to reduced snowpack:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...

There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead will run dry by 2021 and a 10 percent chance it will run out of usable water by 2014...

One scientist's conclusion about the outlook worldwide:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto...

By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes -- Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin."

Asking carbon users to offset some fraction of the damage it causes seems like a very small insurance policy compared to the likely economic damage of continued warming (or the possible collapse of modern civilization).  No one even knows if we can reduce emissions enough to make a dent in the warming, but we'd have to be suicidal to not to give it a try.

We will of course need the cooperation of major emitters like China, but similarly large emitters such as the United States have a long way to go to catch up with them in some areas such as China's average 35 MPG.