Global Warming.

[XxdragicexX]

Well my class got in a huge argument when we started to talk about global warming in Science today.

 

I totally believe in global warming. Proof? Look at the polar ice caps. They are melting at alarming rates and the global average temperature is rising. Hurricanes are getting stronger, storms becoming more destructive. Scientists say Co2 emissions are at an all time high. With temperatures rising, scientists say if it increases by about 5-8 degrees F, sea levels will rise by 20-30 feet. Flooding almost every coastal city.

 

What are your opinions are this?

[miladyz]

Real.

[Kestra15]

It's real. It's not humanity's direct fault.

[Fuzzbucket]

Real but probably part of a cyclical pattern.

 

But even so we should do our best to minimise how much we add to the effects. We do pollute more than anything that came before us.

[Chiaki]

Ha, real. Anyone who doesn't think it that it is real is the equivalent of a child covering their eyes and saying "if I can't see you, you're not there."

 

Yes Global warming is a natural process and it's happened before, obviously otherwise we'd still be in the middle of an ice age. But human activities have sped it up so much that we and everything else on the the planet do not have enough time to adapt.

 

If it continues at the rate it is within the next 40-50 years (that's in our life times) the sea level will have risen 1 meter, putting many major cities underwater. It's not just the sea levels rising either.

 

Many of the acutely sensitive systems which enable life of our planet to survive are being effected. Most people think it's the rainforests which produce most of the worlds oxygen and take in the C02, but its actually algae in the seas. CO2 dissolves in water making it acidic, along with the massive amounts of fresh water melting from the icecaps means that the environment that the algae lives in is changing too rapidly and too severely for them to survive.

 

The changing weather not only means more freak weather occurrences like hurricanes and flooding, but also the ranges of disease carrying insects is extending their into regions where they'd previously died from cold. Things like malaria carrying mosquitoes will probably be making their way across Europe.

 

At this point there is no way we can reverse what's already happened. The only thing we can do is come up with ways to minimise the damage.

[TheDarkCynder]

It's definitely real, but I couldn't tell you exactly why.

 

There is a lot of evidence that the Earth is naturally going through a heating cycle. I'm sure we're not helping it get any cooler.

[Princess Artemis]

http://climateaudit.org/ has a lot of interesting information on it for those who are curious about the statistical side of climate science. That's not all that it talks about, but McIntyre is both respected and feared by climate scientists for how often he examines their work and how often he finds it shoddy by engineering standards, and especially for how often he dares ask scientists to show their tax-payer funded work.

 

http://judithcurry.com/ Judith Curry is a climate scientist who specifically studies hurricanes. What she has to say is worth a look.

 

We're not farming on Greenland yet, which we did in the Medieval Warm Period in the not so distant historical past, so I'm going to hazard believing that the world getting a touch warmer isn't the horribad thing that some climate scientists have predicted it will be. It's far better we be warm than we be cold. So, the globe warms. The globe cools. It's happened before, it will happen again, and life flourishes in the times when the globe is warmer rather than when the globe is cooler.

[Kestra15]

Ha, real. Anyone who doesn't think it that it is real is the equivalent of a child covering their eyes and saying "if I can't see you, you're not there."

 

Yes Global warming is a natural process and it's happened before, obviously otherwise we'd still be in the middle of an ice age. But human activities have sped it up so much that we and everything else on the the planet do not have enough time to adapt.

 

If it continues at the rate it is within the next 40-50 years (that's in our life times) the sea level will have risen 1 meter, putting many major cities underwater. It's not just the sea levels rising either.

 

Many of the acutely sensitive systems which enable life of our planet to survive are being effected. Most people think it's the rainforests which produce most of the worlds oxygen and take in the C02, but its actually algae in the seas. CO2 dissolves in water making it acidic, along with the massive amounts of fresh water melting from the icecaps means that the environment that the algae lives in is changing too rapidly and too severely for them to survive.

 

The changing weather not only means more freak weather occurrences like hurricanes and flooding, but also the ranges of disease carrying insects is extending their into regions where they'd previously died from cold. Things like malaria carrying mosquitoes will probably be making their way across Europe.

 

At this point there is no way we can reverse what's already happened. The only thing we can do is come up with ways to minimise the damage.

I agree with everything here - except your assertions that it is humans who are 'speeding it up.' Given that all the CO2 ever given out by humans since the beginning of the Industrial Age is a negligible fraction of what is naturally in the air already. We have not 'sped it up so much.' Sea levels rise and fall, ice caps expand and retreat, thus is the way of the world.

 

The Earth is freshly emerging out of an ice age and as such everything is indeed melting, sea levels rising, etc. Because that's what happens when things heat up. We did not engineer this, since this heating process has been around longer than we've been industrial. We haven't sped it up in any appreciable way.

 

People act as if Nature is static, but it is not. Systems change, adapt or die all the time, whether we're there or not. True, we've done some real damage to some of those systems in our lifetime, but we're not the sole reason for their destruction. Those that were sensitive enough to fail by an average rise of one degree were always going to die out - after all, we've risen by more than that one degree in recent centuries.

 

Hurricanes and floods are not freak weather events - they are common, year-round, and only marginally predictable. Plagues and diseases come and go as well - that's no fault of humanity, that is simply the way of the world.

[Daydreamer09]

As far as I know, global warming seems to be true.

 

However, I'm always pretty skeptical at the polar footage people show to prove such a thing. Mainly because they never tell if the then and now pictures were taken summer or winter, which makes a big difference and can exaggerate.

 

As Princess Artemis and Kestra15 wonderfully put it, it's a natural thing that happens to our planet. Not necessarily the cause of us humans.

Edited January 6, 2012 by Daydreamer09

[KidaYuki]

Fake. When I was growing up my teacher informed me that we where heading into the next ice age and how global cooling was going to force me out of michigan. She was a old school teacher bought up in the 70s

 

and has anyone here ever heard of climategate? It was when 2,000 documents and 1,000 emails where leaked between global warming scientist in which talked about how they were fluffing the data to make global warming seem worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Rese...ail_controversy and http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/...s_in_99280.html

 

the world go through cycles, nothing much to do with humans, it has warm periods and it has cold periods.

Edited January 6, 2012 by KidaYuki

[Chiaki]

I know it's a natural process but there are far too many humans for us not to have an effect on the planet.

 

No species before us has ever burnt fossil fuels. Burning these things releases the carbon dioxide that was locked up during the Carboniferous period.

 

No the planet isn't a static system but since when have humans reacted well to change?

 

And KidaYuki, scientific methods have moved on quite considerably since the 70's. And what I've read of this "Climategate" it seems that everything was taken out of context, negative results don't necessarily mean your hypothesis is wrong, just your approach or methods, scientific approaches are continually changing.

 

Emails are not an official document and can say anything without any proof or evidence. 2000 documents isn't that much, I know I have at least half that and anyway, no where does it say that ALL of those documents and emails show negative results.

 

The whole thing to me just seems like some reporter looking for a story for the Copenhagen conference.

[TheDarkCynder]

Fake. When I was growing up my teacher informed me that we where heading into the next ice age and how global cooling was going to force me out of michigan. She was a old school teacher bought up in the 70s

 

and has anyone here ever heard of climategate? It was when 2,000 documents and 1,000 emails where leaked between global warming scientist in which talked about how they were fluffing the data to make global warming seem worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Rese...ail_controversy and http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/...s_in_99280.html

 

the world go through cycles, nothing much to do with humans, it has warm periods and it has cold periods.

Global warming 

-noun

An increase in the earth's average atmospheric temperature that causes corresponding changes in climate and that may result from the greenhouse effect.

 

---

 

Global warming doesn't have to have be caused by humans to be called "global warming." A natural heating cycle technically follows the definition of "global warming."

[Kestra15]

and has anyone here ever heard of climategate?  It was when 2,000 documents and 1,000 emails where leaked between global warming scientist in which talked about how they were fluffing the data to make global warming seem worse. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Rese...ail_controversy and http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/...s_in_99280.html

Yes, given I work and studied there, and frankly I laugh at anyone who tries to use it as 'evidence.' Those one or two phrases used, in those thousands of emails and documents, were taken completely out of context and with no regard to what they were actually pointing to. The fact that the eight different committees cleared them of any wrongdoing, and CRU is still considered to be at the forefront of Climate Research, should demonstrate amply that the 'scandal' really was nothing of import. Given I had a look at the numbers myself, I can tell you for free there was no 'fluffing' of data. We had a couple of bits of data that didn't fit the trend at first, but that's because the data in question had come from two different methods. The 'trick' was a valid, logical conversion to get the two sets of data to be measured in the same way, thus making all the data and trends valid. The method in question is in fact a rather old, well-known and often-used one, and it was no secret either - the papers in which the data was published openly stated what method was used to bring both sets of data onto the same scaling.

 

In the scientific community, the whole thing was nothing more than a bit of an inconvenient piece of PR. The actual data, research etc was completely unaffected and well above-board. It, like everything related to the politically-motivated "Global Warming" mythology, is just a cheap smear campaign. Politicians take one small word or phrase from a scientist, then twist it to become something entirely new and nothing like what it was meant to be, for purely selfish means and goals.

 

Chiaki, we do indeed do some rotten damage to the planet through pollution etc. We are indeed using up natural resources at a horrifying rate. But we're certainly not responsible for heating the planet into a demise. Contributing, yes, but not the sole reason for the Earth "overheating" and creating "apoplectic storms" etc etc.

Edited January 6, 2012 by Kestra15

[Chiaki]

Not to its demise lord no. Life will still be here long after humans have gone. And I know that we're not the sole reason for it. It's just things like this Climategate where people twist the truth make me really mad. The planet is continuously changing and its things like that that stop people from finding solutions to the developing problems facing us.

Edited January 6, 2012 by Chiaki

[Kestra15]

Not to its demise lord no. Life will still be here long after humans have gone. And I know that we're not the sole reason for it. It's just things like this Climategate where people twist the truth make me really mad. The planet is continuously changing and its things like that that stop people from finding solutions to the developing problems facing us.

This, pretty much.

[shabiga]

real

[DarkFire1]

I really have nothing to say to this whatsoever. ^ ^;

[Infinis]

It's real but I refuse to call it global warming, I simply refer to it as climate change.

 

And the only thing that worries me about it is the melting of the polar ice caps, because of the poor aftereffects that would cause.

 

[JOTB]

Global warming is real. It's happening. The only thing left to debate is why.

 

Don't see why it's so impossible for people to contribute to it though. Large amounts of greenhouse gases being suddenly released into the atmosphere have occurred before and caused increased global temperatures (Late Paleocene Thermal Maximum, anyone?) and that's pretty much what's occurring now.

Edited January 6, 2012 by JOTB

[Princess Artemis]

It, like everything related to the politically-motivated "Global Warming" mythology, is just a cheap smear campaign. Politicians take one small word or phrase from a scientist, then twist it to become something entirely new and nothing like what it was meant to be, for purely selfish means and goals.

Based on what I've read, the main point of the first set of so-called Climategate e-mails was about a Yamal paleoclimate trend, which was something that had been being looked at for a good while before the e-mails got out, not the rest that got paid attention to in the news. Anything else within was just extra, but it has made Mann, Jones, etc., look bad to other climate scientists such as Dr. Mullen, the person behind BEST.

 

Yeah, some of it was just political horsefeathers, but not all of what came out of that was purely politically motivated nor a smear campaign. When climate scientists look at other climate scientists and conclude there was something not kosher about what was done, I tend to at least give some credence to their judgment, considering they are talking within their field. When statisticians tell climate scientists their use of statistics could use some work, it strikes me as quite possible that it is indeed true, as they are speaking within their field. That's not politics, that's the self-correcting nature of science at work.

[Gsea]

Definitely real and not entirely humanity's fault.

[Kestra15]

Based on what I've read, the main point of the first set of so-called Climategate e-mails was about a Yamal paleoclimate trend, which was something that had been being looked at for a good while before the e-mails got out, not the rest that got paid attention to in the news. Anything else within was just extra, but it has made Mann, Jones, etc., look bad to other climate scientists such as Dr. Mullen, the person behind BEST.

And yet the gentlemen in question are still at the forefront of the research, and their material was cleared by the scientific community. So they don't look that bad to the scientific community.

[Syaoransbear]

It's real and it happens all the time. There's already several incredibly old cities and civilizations that are under the sea from water levels rising. You'd think people would learn that maybe coastal cities aren't a good idea after a while but I guess not.

[gravity404]

Real. Look at the astounding evidence. As mentioned in the start of the thread, the polar icecaps are melting. Our winters are getting colder and colder, and our summers are getting hotter. The cold air from the melting icecaps is showing up in our freezing winter climate. Then global warming itself is showing up in our summers. I prefer to call it "global climate change", but eventually the entire planet will theoretically become drastically warmer in general.

[Princess Artemis]

And yet the gentlemen in question are still at the forefront of the research, and their material was cleared by the scientific community. So they don't look that bad to the scientific community.

Point is, they look bad to some within the scientific community not because of a political smear campaign but because of their own methodology. Ergo, it was not all a smear campaign perpetuated by politicians taking a phrase or two out of context. Scientists can disagree with one another for real, substantial reasons.