Who Believes In Climate Change??

essaichay

Random question, but I'm not sure if the government is just using climate change as a reason to push forward carbon taxing etc.


Btw, I recycle.

Moridin

I do not believe, I know.

lisab

I don't know that there is much debate now about climate change. The real question is whether it's changing because of what humans have been doing, or if it's changing due to natural forces.

Evo

Climate change has been happening since the earth had an atmosphere.

As Lisa stated, the debate is over how significant is human's contribution, if any, to climate change.

Benzoate

I'm pretty skeptical about humans contributing a significance change in the Earth's climate. There are other factors that affect the earth's climate , like cosmic rays, the solar wind from the sun and volcano's on the earth. Besides, there were time in the pre-industrial revolution age when global temperatures were actually warming than they are now.

Chi Meson

It is indisputable that the global temperatures are rising. Climate is changing. The globe is warming. I believe it.

Our contribution is also real, but...

If you spit into a bucket full of water, you have contributed to the level of water in the bucket. Our habits do increase the percentage of gasses in the atmosphere that absorb and trap radiation, but the "enhanced effect" of this contribution is the "spit," and just how big is the naturally occurring "bucket"?

If we all stopped emitting carbon dioxide right now, the spit would still be in the bucket. I choose not to spit too much, although I don't mind stretching a metaphor to its breaking point.

Ivan Seeking

Who believes that non-experts have any basis for an opinion?

For those that do, what is the logic for this argument?

Benzoate

Are temperatures are rising now, but that does not mean they will continue to rise indefinetely . There was a global cooling trend that occured in the 1950's and 1960's. There was also an abrupt increase in global temperatures that did not correlated the carbon dioxide that was linearly increasing in the atmosphere.

On the other hand pullotion is a big problem and should be dealt with.

Benzoate

If you are referring to me, what makes you such an expert in global warming? Are you a climate scientist who has actually been performing experimental research on our atmosphere , by measuring the temperature of our atmosphere over a period of time? Or have you been listening to what al gore , al sharpton, and pat robertson have been saying about global warming?

For your information, you do not have to be an expert on global warming to have an opinion about global warming. As long as you base your arguments about global warming on journal articles written by actual climate scientists whose research is global warming, then your opinion should carry merit.

Parlyne

It is, in general, a rather difficult proposition to determine what actually causes climate change. This is why it has been a subject of so much study. However, ruling out possible causes is not nearly as hard as ruling them in.

Let's say you think of some factor (like, for example the solar wind) that you think might be a significant contribution to climate change. What you can do is look at the time scales on which that factor varies significantly (for the solar wind, there is huge variations on an 11 year cycle, associated with sunspot activity) and check whether the climate varies on the same time scale. With climate change, we've seen a generally increasing trend in temperature over a scale of a century or more; but, there are not signifcant 11 year variations in that. This suggests that the solar wind is not a big contributor to the climate, because it means that, to have the observed effect on temperatures, the changes in the solar wind over that last century would have to be orders of magnitude larger than those of its 11 year cycle.

There are quite a few other proposed causes of climate change that can be similarly discounted by the recognition of a lack of variations with their characteristic time scales.

Chi Meson

I'm not talking about warming over years or decades. Warming or cooling over that short a time span is trivial. Let's talk centuries and millennia. We are on the warm side of a 20,000 year cycle.

Consider Greenland. It took more than the 50s and 60s to collect the ice that melted from there last year.

Benzoate

But there have been six and seven ice ages that have expanded from a couple of centuries to thousands of years.

Ivan Seeking

It is the same question that I post to any discussion of amateur and unqualifed opinions. In fact I hadn't even read your post. I was speaking to the op.

Where did I state any opinion? In fact my opinion is that we have to listen to climate scientists.

If one needs to have definite opinions about questions that they're not qualifed to answer, no one can stop them, but it doesn't give any validity to the opinion. It is still just noise.

Evo

That's great Chi. And a good place to stop because these threads go nowhere fast.