Is Global Warming Real?

Okay, as a screaming liberal I have to admit one area that I just don't pay attention to or even give a lot of thought to is the environment. I know this makes me a bad bad bad liberal, but I don't even care what a candidates position is on the environment.

I recycle, but only because all my trash won't fit in that can unless I use that little recycle bin. I think we should conserve fuel, but mostly from a position of being a less reliant on foreign oil.

Having spent a lot of time in the developing world, I also see the benefits of emmission controls on cars. (and maybe factories, I don't know) If you look at the skies of Cairo or Delhi or Lagos, this is pretty apparent.

Now for my question. Is global warming real at all? It seems like we are blaming everything on global warming and I am still not convinced of the science behind it. I don't have time to become an expert on climate change either.

So how many people here actually believe in global warming?

Global warming is real. No scientist denies that.

The debate is whether humans caused it or if it's part of a natural cycle.

Sorry for being a dork

The USA has been experiencing one of the worst hurricane seasons in history, while back here in Portugal, just across the Atlantic, we are having a 2-year long drought.
The snow cap that has covered the top of Kilimanjaro for the past 11,000 years is rapidly disappearing. Recently, sea ice in the Arctic reached a record minimum.
Huge icebergs twice the size of Rhode Island are calving off Antarctica.
The Inuit people are launching a human rights case against the Bush administration claiming they face extinction because of global warming.
Yup... something's definitely amiss.

Here in Norway constant sun barly any bad weather anymore, few brisk winds but nothing like it was, used to have so much snow we had to dig cars out , now it barly goes over my shoe, so uh yeah.

Theres nothing to belive in, its a fact, i do belive humans caused it cause we are greedy selfish rapid evolving caring little about the enviroment, ok soooo not all are but we are the cause i firmly belive , the last years loads of recycling projects has started to care more, things get more and more recyclable, low consumption, but that might be cause they want to earn money again ;P

What he said, but with one addition. Humans are definately contributing to global warming, but whether it is by a significant amount or not is being hotly debated. I think we are.

Without getting into my thoughts on Global Warming, I will say that the hurricane season has nothing to do with it from what I have read. We are just experiencing the normal hurricane cycles. Here is a quote from just one of many articles about it:



That article can be found here: http://www.globalwarming.org/article.php?uid=286

Now. I find it ironic this article in on the global warming website, but eh! hehe They don't say if they think "global warming" caused the cycles to increase or anything like that. Everything I read points to the "salinity content".

And now I'm going to back out of this thread. hehe


EDIT TO ADD: Here is another article I found:
NOT GLOBAL WARMING BUT HURRICANE CYCLES

I don't find it ironic. I would be a bit worried if even the most enthusiastic proponents of global warming as a result of human activities did not consider other causes to local effects.

Valid point!

You have to be joking (and it's a bad joke). Why not post something interesting instead of just stirring up a lot of argument for laughs?

This is the issue, not whether it's "real" or not.

It may the climax of a long term warming cycle over the last 10,000 years. It may be the crest of a short term climatological "syn wave" that bottomed out with the "Little Ice Age" about 800 years ago. Or it could be a human-created "trigger" to the beginning of another global cold cycle catalyzed by alterations to stable ocean currents like the Gulf Stream. Or it could be entirely human-created. And there are other possibilities.

When you get past the question of whether global warming is real or not, you'll find that the scientific community is rife with speculation based on very little available experimentation. Which means they don't know. Yet.

??? *scratches head*

Yes, global warming is real and you'd be hard pressed to find a scientist in the developed world who disagrees. It is a matter of simple historical record that Earth is getting warmer. It's not a theory, not a prediction; it's happening and it's being measured. Just take a look at recorded temperatures from around the world since regular recording began up until now. The current trend is undeniable.

What is in dispute is two things. One is what the cause is, and the other is what the effects are and will be in the future. Personally, I believe human activity to be a large part of the cause, but there are plenty of people who will tell you it's just a natural phenomenon, as the Earth's mean temperature has been in flux since day one.

As for the effects, well obviously sea levels will continue to rise as long as the temperature keeps going up. Weather patterns will likely change. Life on this planet may take a dramatic turn, as it has many times in the past.

One thing's clear, I think. The Earth will survive. Whether or not we will is a different story. As George Carlin once put it, "The Earth has been around for billions of years. We've been around for maybe a couple hundred thousand years. The Earth isn't going anywhere. We are."

Well, maybe we are. All I think we can really say at this point is it's a definite maybe. The odds are much better if we learn to clean up our act relatively soon, but somehow I doubt that's gonna happen.

We're pretty arrogant as a species in that we think about problems short term, and then we expect our solutions to remain permanent. We do things like build cities on fault lines, on volcanoes, in flood paths, and then we're suprised when all of a sudden they're gone. We have yet to do much in our designs that takes into account the fact that the Earth is a moving, dynamic machine, not a static canvas.

I remember once visiting the isle of Chincoteague, off the coast of Virginia, which among its strange attractions features a centuries old inland lighthouse. Now why in the world would the settlers build a lighthouse in the middle of the island, where it's totally useless, instead of putting it on the shore where it belongs? Well, the answer is they didn't. Chincoteague, it turns out, is a "moving island". The natural geologic process of there is such that the island is constantly growing on one side as new deposits of silt and sand are washed ashore, while it's constantly being eroded on the other side at about the same rate. Result: a couple centuries later, what was once the shore is now the middle, and what was once the opposite shore is gone. Moral of the story: the Earth is always changing.

Not even the air we breath is constant. At the time of the Permian mass extinction, in which 90% of all life on this planet died, there was only half as much oxygen in the air as there is now (10%, compared to our 21%). Fossilized fire remains and air bubbles found in amber have shown that at different periods throughout dinosaur history, oxygen levels ranged from the Permian-like level of 10% to as much as 35%. With changes like that, it's no wonder there have been so many different forms of life on this planet, and no suprise that none of them have been permanent. We're no different.

Anyway, to get back to the temperature discussion, one thing that's interesting is global WARMING is not the only issue. There are plenty of scientists who are just as concerned about global cooling as time progresses towards the next ice age. I took a class on ice ages in college, which to my suprise at the time turned out to be one of the most interesting classes I ever took. Most people think of "THE Ice Age" as one freaky time when it was cold everywhere, and then it got better. Well, that couldn't be further from the truth. It turns out there have been a great many ice ages, occuring at somewhat regular intervals every few tens of thousands of years.

And it wasn't cold everywhere. The tropics were still tropical, the middle lattitudes were still temperate, the poles were still polar. The whole thing was just a few degrees lower than it is now. Those degrees, few as they were, made literally a world of difference. Half of North America, for example, was covered in ice that was 2 miles thick. So much water was locked up in those glaciers that global sea levels were just a shadow of what they are now.

That's not speculation, by the way; it's fact. The evidence is everywhere, but for an example of proof with a human face on it, consider that there are cave paintings on the bottom of the English Channel. Those cavemen weren't scuba diving. They lived there. Sea levels were low enough that what is now covered by 50 meters of water was at that time dry land, above sea level. It's really pretty amazing.

The Earth is an ever changing system. Until we learn to cater our behavior to that fact, we're always gonna be at risk.

Not only don't I not have to be joking, I wasn't joking. A for interesting posts, I will agree your sunny disposition is much more interesting than my post. You'd better be careful placing yourself out in public though, someone might drop a house on you too.

Although, I should have probably phrased my question differently. You can attribute my poor question to my admitted ignorance of the issue.

So everyone seems to agree the temperature is increasing here on earth (although I don't feel it) but not every is in agreement as to why or what it means for us all.

I guess I am still back at square one.

Ok, I voted "yes", BUT....

Yes, it's true that the earth has been naturally, I repeat-NATURALLY-increasing in tempurature over the centuries, but we're talking about percentages of a degree here-not this global epidemic most of the tree huggers are screaming about like Chicken Little.
http://junkscience.com/


-Kiamat Dusk
Hug a logger, you'll never go back to trees....

Well, most everyone is in agreement that "what it means for us all" is trouble. That is, unless your part of the Bush administration, in which case it means new sunny beaches in Antacrtica, nice weather for oil drilling without a coat in Alaska, and smooth sailing across the North Pole without all that annoying ice in your way. Isn't God thoughtful to provide all that for lil' ol' Dubbya?

You've been fooled by euphemistic labeling. From their web site:

From the Consumer Alert web site:

When one tracks down their source of funding (not listed on their sites), they will find:
The globalwarming.org and consumeralert.org websites are corporate run (by proxy) web sites that pretend to be a grass-roots organization.

~Ulrika~

I would like to make some observations about this poll.

1. Science is not a democratic process, instead the truth lies in the repeatability of the science.
   
2. Polls on the accuracy of scientific theories lead to the reinforcement of a fallacy known as ad populum or the appeal to popularity. That is, those who see their choice as most popular will assume that it is true.
   
3. Political and corporate groups use propaganda in the form of unscientific studies, selective reporting, and fake grass-roots groups to confuse the public.
   
4. People tend to look to scientists as priests and their theories as absolute truths like scripture, which leads to the appeal to authority fallacy. This is a fallacy where the statements of authority figures are accepted as facts.
   
5. Most people in this forum should have selected "I don't know" as an option, simply because they don't know.
   
6. A better question would have been "are you well informed enough to judge whether the science behind global warming repeatable."

How do I feel about the subject? The mechanism behind the theory of global warming, that an increase in the amount of greenhouse gasses can increase temperature in a closed system receiving radiant energy, is proven and repeatable on small scales. There has also been a measured and repeatable increase in greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere in the past hundred years due to the industrial revolution. Given those two facts, I'm already concerned.

~Ulrika~

Everything I know I learned playing video games .

I don't know what y'all are bitchin' about. It's clear from all the tropical landscapes and islands across the main grid and the private sims in Second Life that that's what y'all want. So George is trying to bring that to you in real life, too. Let's congratulate him and call him the Philip Linden of RL, right? Same vision, bigger toys to play with.

Right?

Regarding priests, the democratic process, and the methods of science, it's worth noting that answers to whether global warming is part of a "normal" cyclical process over thousands of years, or is catalyzed largely by human interaction with the environment - is largely to be found in a variety of interdisciplinary sources. Some of them lie in the domain of traditional natural sciences - geology, botany, climatology, etc. - some of them lie in the domain of the human sciences - anthropology, history, etc. - and some of them are technical in nature - forensic pathology, forensic anthropology, computer modeling, etc.

This fact makes climatological modeling over thousands of years tricky: sometimes subjective, afflicted by biases not normally affecting other scientific endeavors, and very broad and complex. Which is largely why there's good debate on the subject - which is mostly scientific and scholarly - and bad debate, which is mostly political and financially-based.

Apologies then and sorry.

I honestly thought you were just screwing around. I did not think anyone (with the exception of George Bush) could possibly belive that global warming wasn't a real thing.

It's like saying "So some people think the moon circles the earth, is this true?" IMO.

Look into global dimming too. Hooray for pollution. I love it when things fix themselves (nevermind about cancer or acid rain or anything).

That *is* global warming though Pen.

The change in the salinity content is due to the melting arctic ice, (especially the greenland sheet.) Because of global warming, the ice will continue to melt until it is mostly gone, with most predictions placing that event within our lifetimes.

The hurricanes will get worse and worse as this happens.

If I had propery in a hurricane zone, or indeed within 100 metres of sea-level and was able to sell it, I would. Seriously.

I believe in global dimming too.

People seem to be getting dumber every day!

If "Global Warming" must be defined as a human caused thing, I'm not sure. I guess if you're going to classify it as possibly naturally caused too, then I think I'd say it's real. It certainly seems that way anyway. Aren't we in the middle of an "ice age", in long term global terms, anyway?

But isn't the debate on whether or not it's human caused? I once read something about a volcano, I don't know which, but supposedly this volcano erupted and contributed to global warming more than humans (or the US?) have done in some ridiculous amount of time. IIRC it made our contribution seem (almost?) insignificant. Maybe someone else is familiar with what I'm vaguely recalling...