Why do scientists think burning fossil fuels changes the climate?

Question

I'm doing homework and a paper about "The Carbon Cycle" asks:

Millions of years ago, organisms that didn't totally decompose were changed into coal, oil, and natural gas. These are now our supply of fossil fuels. This stored carbon is realeased into the air as carbon dioxide when the fuels are burned. Explain why some scientists believe this is causing our climate to change?

Thanks

Answer 1

Just look how much profits Exxon and other energy corporations make each month.  Many people would like to have that money, to take it from them.  If they do this, then it's stealing.  If the gvmt does it, then it's taxes.

In the last 100 years, the carbon has increased just 0.01%, or just one co2 molecule per million each year.  This is far too small a number to cause any effect on the climate.

If scientist say that it's the Sun, not man causing "global warming", then there's no reason to tax corporations like Exxon.

Follow the money.

Answer 2

The actual "why" of it can get pretty complicated, but the basic idea is that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is causing temperatures to rise. This has happened for millions of years in Earth's history, but it's pretty safe to say that humans are exacerbating the current trend.

The atmosphere is one of the smallest carbon reservoirs on the planet. It's climatology 101. The smaller your system, the quicker the effects will come and the larger they will be. For most of Earth's history [here I am referring to the time since the beginning of life.. nothing before that], levels have not really risen much above 1000 ppm and haven't fallen much below 100 ppm. On this continuum, we're at about 350 ppm.

Why does this matter? On the lower end of this continuum, small changes in levels of CO2 will yield large effects. This type of trend continues until you get to about 800-1000 ppm. At this point, the atmosphere becomes carbon saturated. You could add 500 ppm and you'd see virtually no effect.

The issue of global warming is much more complex than just the burning of fossil fuels, though. It is true that humans are contributing to it, but to say that humans are the sole cause of climate change would be ridiculous. Not to sound like a skeptical bigot, but we're in the middle of an interglacial period. Specifically, we're living in one of the 10,000-year warming trends that punctuate 90,000-year cycles of glacier/icesheet-growth. Warming would be occurring without our help, but it is fair to say that we are contributing to it more than we perhaps need to.

Hope this helps!

Answer 3

Two general conclusions have been reached by most researchers who have looked carefully at the subject. The first is that the mean surface temperature of the Earth will most likely rise by 1-2°C (2-4°F) over the next fifty to one hundred years, if we continue to burn oil and coal and other fossil fuels at ever-increasing rates. The other is that the effects of what we have already burned are not unequivocally apparent in global temperature records.

Answer 4

Troy i think you mean heat, absorbing light would make the world brighter not warmer

Answer 5

Uh, cause it is.

Answer 6

Here is a site that explains everything better than I could do. But you have to spend the time to read it.

http://www.coyoteblog.com/Skeptics_Guide...

Answer 7

Um, carbon dioxide supposedly absorbs light that the earth would otherwise reflect into space, keeping it warm.

Answer 8

1. It has all happened before:

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/P-T%20bo...

"As a greenhouse gas, it warms the atmosphere, changing ecological conditions. (Deccan Traps volcanism, coming before the end of the Cretaceous, is estimated to have warmed the world by 3° to 5°C, or 5.4° to 9°F; Ravizza and Peucker-Ehrenbrink, 2003.) And because it combines chemically to form carbonic acid, it also produces mildly acidic rain. Acid rain can dissolve calcium carbonate shells, particularly those at or near the ocean surface.  Additionally, acid rain leaches vital nutrients from the soil, resulting in plant stunting and death."

Climate Model Links Warmer Temperatures to Permian Extinction

http://www.physorg.com/news6003.html

"The CCSM indicated that ocean temperatures warmed significantly at higher latitudes because of rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The warmer temperatures reached a depth of about 10,000 feet (4,000 meters), interfering with the normal circulation process in which colder surface water descends, taking oxygen and nutrients deep into the ocean.

As a result, ocean waters became stratified with little oxygen, proving deadly to marine life. Because marine organisms were no longer removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that, in turn, accelerated warming temperatures.

"The implication of our study is that elevated [carbon dioxide] is sufficient to lead to inhospitable conditions for marine life and excessively high temperatures over land would contribute to the demise of terrestrial life," the authors conclude.

Climate simulation of the latest Permian: Implications for

mass extinction

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/aboutus/staf...

2. The timing for current warming is unexpected, contrary to the cooling solar influence of natural Milankovich cycles:

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."  

3. We can identify the amount of CO2 that mankind has inserted into today's atmosphere from the ratios of different carbon isotopes:

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

So climate change has happened due to CO2 before and the results were devastating to life, the timing of the change is not what we'd expect from other explanations such as solar radiation cycles due to orbital changes, and we can see that mankind has increased CO2 levels.  In short, we're causing the type of change that has been devastating to life on this planet in the past.

For more background on the history of the science behind greenhouse gas theory, here's a good summary:

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

Answer 9

What is Jello talking about?

Exxon and other oil companies pay less taxes than most businesses percentage wise.

and

We give Exxon and other oil companies $80 billion a year in taxpayer funded subsidies.  

CO2 is up 35% since the industrial revolution started, the highest by far in at least the last 4000,000 years.  Not the small number he shows.

And yes follow the money, it leads directly to the oil companies, who  use that vast wealth to shape our opinions and our public policy.  Maybe the most powerful lobby in the U.S.  

You don't even have to consider global warming to understand that you can't keep pumping poisons in to the atmosphere without it having some negative effect, at the very least, causing an imbalance in the chemistry of the atmosphere.  Common sense tells you that.   You can't fool mother nature, and you can't fool me.  Or anyone else with their eyes open

And the idea, that it is the sun, has been proven wrong. One reason we know that, is because we have more warming of night time than daytime temperatures.  http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...     Read about the myths about global warming that have already been addressed, but nonetheless keep popping up here.

Answer 10

Do your own homework.

That said, here's how it works.  Plants take in CO2, strip the carbon off for their own use and give off O2.  Animals, use the O2 to burn carbon based fuels in their bodies, giving off CO2.   This is the carbon cycle.  If this alone took place, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would remain fairly constant.

Unfortunately, the carbon compounds that had been stored in the ground by that decomposition process, and are so useful to us as energy sources, put more carbon into the atmosphere (technically it's not new, as it was once there millions of years ago, but the atmosphere had long since achieved equilibrium without it).  

This raises the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere, making our atmosphere more effective at retaining heat (which is bad, since all out ecosystems are evolved to work the way it is now and cannot evolve fast enough to cope in without crashing).

While the carbon cycle (through more vegetation) could change to cope with this increased amount (as the CO2 level in the air naturally varies a bit, it does this), at cannot do it nearly as fast (by an order of magnitude or more) as we are adding carbon.  

Thus, adding new material to an otherwise closed system throws it off balance, with potentially devastating consequences.