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Humans are Causing Global Warming
Big_Al_B writes "A Times Online article discusses a new study comparing 7 million real world datapoints with several computer models of global warming. Each model had a possible cause associated with it." From the article: "It found that natural variation in the Earth's climate, or changes in solar activity or volcanic eruptions, which have been suggested as alternative explanations for rising temperatures, could not explain the data collected in the real world. "
Even the Bush White House has said over six months ago that humans are responsible for global warming. Unfortunately, there are many people who will refuse to let your overwhelming evidence influence their dogma...
http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/speeches _quote04.html/
Interesting speech by Michael Crichton on whether global warming is science or politics and what the difference is. Highly recommended no matter what side you are on.
Of course, who wants to be on the side of ignoring or supporting the widespread destruction of the planet by humans? Therein likes the rub...
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
No, it just shows that you know how to use Google.
i) The propagation mechanism for Rossby Waves
ii) The primary sources of deep water formation in the Atlantic
iii) How a western boundary current is formed
iv) What Meddies are.
v) What a pycnocline is.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Actually, President Clinton signed the Kyoto treaty in 1998. However, under the US Constitution, all treaties must be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the Senate -- no such vote has ever been scheduled, because there's not enough Senate support for the treaty.
In 2001, President Bush "withdrew" the US signature on the Kyoto treaty -- I have no idea if such a withdrawal is legitimate, not that it matters much.
Weather is not climate. Climate is based on long-term trends. Weather is unpredictable.
An analogy would be that if you flipped a coin once, you wouldn't be able to tell if it would end up heads or tails, but if you flipped it a thousand or a million times, you'd notice a general trend of 50-50.
We have climate data from ice cores drilled into miles of ice in the ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica. This data goes back hundreds of thousands of years. The method uses stable isotopes Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18. Using the ratios of those two isotopes a scientist can determine climate as old as the ice he is sampling.
To use comments out of context is a disengenous ploy. Willful ignorance and deceit are not virtous behaviour.
And the other fact you need to face is that modelers spends hours and hours tweaking their models until they "look right", and if "humans are the cause of global warming" is what looks right to them (and they get paid to get that result) then that is what the models say.
Perhaps this is true. But those on the other side do it as well - they also train their "there's no problem" models to fit all the weather data that is available.
Which is why this particular study is so very important - they didn't tweak the models, they took a bunch of existing tweaked models and applied them to another set of data. The models made predictions about ocean temperatures, but hadn't been tweaked with them.
And it turns out that the predictions of the "the greenhouse effect is currently causing warming" models were very close to the actual measurements, and the predictions of the "it's volcanic activity / a solar cycle / natural fluctuations in weather" models totally failed.
This study addresses exactly that criticism of yours, and it blows it away.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
We don't have thousands and thousands of years of climate data, let alone multiple periods' worth.
We don't have thousands of years of weather data. We do have thousands of years of climate data, thanks to fossils and ice cores.
Weather data is specific, as in "67 degrees F and rained 1/4 of an inch".
Climate data is more general, such as "averages 50-70 degrees in winter, raining 10 inches".
We don't need to have collected weather data in order to get climate data, it just makes the climate data more accurate. But we can use the ice cores/fossils to say that, within a reasonable margin of error, the average tempature rose by 3 degrees over a particular 10,000 year period.
Have you any idea how much CO2 is emitted by 6 Billion breathing humans every year? That amount is far greater than the amount that has been emitted by all the oil that has been burned in the last 100 years.
t ent/Climate.html
You're kidding me, right? Please tell me you are kidding. Even the EPA admits that "Fossil fuels burned to run cars and trucks, heat homes and businesses, and power factories are responsible for about 98% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions" [1]
And regarding methane, yes it is more potent as a greenhouse gas, but livestock warming the earth? They don't contribute anywhere near as much aggregate effect as carbon dioxide.
1. http://yosemite.epa.gov/OAR/globalwarming.nsf/con
This is silly. A significant majority of anthropogenic climate forcing is due to CO2 produced directly by burning fossil fuels.
Indirect contributions to CO2, such as deforestation is very small in comparison. This can be seen by observing that during the 18th and 19th centuries, deforesting large areas of North America caused a measurable, but very small increase in atmospheric CO2. Burning fossil fuels in the 20th century caused a large increase in CO2 levels. There are several ways to tell where the carbon is coming from: isotope analysis shows that most of the additional carbon is old on the scale of the carbon 13 lifetime, so it has not come from organic material formed in the last couple of hundred thousand years. Second, the timing and magnitude of the increase coincides directly with the growth of fossil fuel use and not with any other anthropogenic or natural phenomenon.
Methane gets a lot of press, but it only lives for a decade in the atmosphere before it's oxidized, whereas carbon dioxide has a much longer lifetime (around a century) so it poses a much greater threat.
Even if we consider methane, cow farts are only a small fraction of total anthropogenic methane emissions.
These analyses are based on detailed models of the atmosphere, and those most certainly take into account the different contributions of CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gases. So, scientists can very much distinguish which gases are primarily responsible for causing global warming.
If cow farts were responsible for global warming, Kyoto would be a treaty on cow farts. Furthermore, methane has a short half life in the atmosphere, that would be really swell. Likewise, if deforestation were responsible for global warming, all the more reason to stop deforestation.
Unfortunatly for everybody concerned, it's easy to tell that cow farts are not the primary cause of global warming, CO2 is. CO2 has a long atmospheric half life, which means that we will have to live with the consequences of our stupidity for centuries.
In fact, what climate models really show is that other human activity (e.g., particulate emissions) has so far probably masked the full extent of global warming, so that things may actually already be further advanced than they appear based on our actual climate measurements. (And, in case you are wondering, we can't continue activities contributing to this masking effect because it has been killing huge numbers of people already.)