Does anybody else think that Global Warming is the propaganda of the sierra club liberals who want to feel good about themselves? It is a bunch of crap and if you want to you can find out the real answers from good websites like http://www.globalwarming.org and others just type into your search engine “Global Warming Hoax”,or “Ozone Depletion Deception.”
Thanks,
P.S. does anybody remember in 1976-77 the pseudo “scientists” and the enviromentalists were talking about GLOBAL COOLING? Well they did, they just want tjo scare you into their ways!!!
Have you been paying attention to the weather at all these past couple of years? You CANNOT tell me that it isn’t getting warmer. Example: Where I am 10 years ago there was snow by Halloween, today, it was in the upper 60’s.
Hmmmm . . . Nope. I sure don’t. Neither do the vast majority of climatologists and meteorologists.
But you’re welcome to believe what you want to believe.
Would showing you some unbiased evidence lead you to change your mind? That is, do you really want to debate this, or are you just looking for people who believe as you do?
DNFTT
So if global warming and global cooling are both bunches of crap, that must mean the earth’s climate is staying exactly the same. Are you sure the earth’s climate is staying exactly the same?
Given the global warming potential of methane, and increases in anthropogenic methane sources, wouldn’t it be a little bit of a surprise if the earth’s temperature were to remain exactly the same? How about other greenhouse gasses? Are you certain they are having no effect at all?
Do you think the greenhouse effect of these gasses is exactly offset by the local cooling associated with acid aerosols? Given the vastly shorter half-lives of acid aerosols vis a vis a lot of the worst greenhouse gasses, wouldn’t it be more likely that these local cooling patterns are in fact masking any rises in long-term global temperature, since a disproportionate number of the thermometers used to get a picture of the global climate are in areas affected by those aerosols?
You say that a vast majority of meterologists support global warming. Get real statistics, don’t assume.
actually if you use this link, http://globalwarming.org/brochure.html
you will find that only 17% of the members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Society thought that the warming of the 20th century was a result was of the emission of greenhouse gases. So hah you are wrong.
Matt
P.S. Look, without the Greenhouse effect the earth would not hold life, but it would be like the moon which is very hot in the day and very cold during the night. I think you should all look at the actual data and not what a computer tells you. And about the Ozone hole. Everybody hates CFCs. They think that we are going to destroy the ozone layer with CFCs. But Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines spewed out more than 1,000 times (yes multiplies by)more than all of the CFCs every made by man. This was one volcanic eruption in 4 billion years of volcanic eruptions. This is much more than we can release. We aren’t powerful enough to destroy our planet, deal with it. On a side not for all of the Christians, I think that (WWJD)What Would Jesus Drive, is an excellent question. I think that Jesus would drive a 1969 Dodge Charger with a 528 hemi in it that would get about 6 miles to the gallon because he would have faith in the earth that he built!!! Thanks, Matt
P.P.S. check out sites like http://www.globalwarming.org and http://www.sepp.org
hey Dignan, the example you give about the temperature at Halloween is laughable. Do you think that man has made the temperature rise 30 degrees in 10 years??? You are crazy! Do some research. So did man cause El Nino as well??? Just because it is warmer where you are now doesn’t mean that man caused it.
Nature does not make carbon-chlorine bonds. Elemental chlorine has a vastly shorter half-life than any halocarbon. Why did you bring up ozone anyway?
http://www.globalwarming.org/brochure.html says,
What kind of a factoid is that? They are obviously measuring their percentages by volume or mass, which is completely useless way to measure greenhouse gasses. Real scientists measure greenhouse gasses by global warming potential. In Biogeochemistry: An Analysis of Global Change, William Schlesinger points out on p. 316,
He also shows that anthropogenic sources of methane are responsible for roughly two-thirds of the total production of methane in a year. One of the worst greenhouse gasses is predominantly created by humans. If “globalwarming.org” were a serious scientific organization, they would have pointed that out; trying to minimise the effects of pollution by equating methane with water vapor as far as global change is concerned totally blows their credibility with me.
Here is the EPA’s website explaining global warming potential, which might be of interest to non-trolls:
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/emissions/national/gwp.html
You’ll note that the artificial molecules have vastly greater global warming potentials than anything that occurs in nature. The natural molecules are, of course, present in much greater quantities.
Given that kgriffey’s last post was 20 minutes after my first post, and I haven’t gotten a whisper of a response, I’m starting to wonder if I should have taken Dr. Lao’s advice.
I don’t believe that all of the world’s problems can be traced to Global Warming. However, neither do I believe it to be a myth.
The real question shouldn’t be “Is the planet getting warmer?”, but “What’s causing it?” Pollution? Naturally-occuring climate shifts? Some wacky, zany amalgamation of the two?
I’ve never really believed in Global Warming either, for what it’s worth. I don’t have any cites to back me up, as I really don’t give a toss (if we die, we die, if we don’t, then fine).
But I do believe that the hype and hysteria over global warming was based originally on speculative computer models that were inconclusive and often contradictory. And what i think has happened since is any perceived changes in climate are attributed to global warming, even if it may not be that at all, colouring the statistics somewhat.
What has changed lately is the degree, detail, accuracy, and intense studying of the temperature records we take now. Whereas a thousand, 500, 100, 50, 20 years ago, it was very vague and inaccurate, if they were taken at all. It’s really hard to compare, therefore, today’s temperature fluctuations with the past. Not impossible, of course, but not neccesarily accurately reflecting the Global Warming model.
And similar doubts arise for me regarding the hole in the Ozone Layer.
I am not a scientist, and I don’t play one on TV (though I do look like one when I wear a lab coat), but as a casual observer of this phenomenon, I say… skepticism is healthy.
First off, the Ozone layer and the Greenhouse effect are entirely separate issues–just like the Big Bang and Evolution. The only relation is that certain people are opposed to both, and try to lump them together.
Secondly, although there is still some debate over the issue, global warming is fairly well accepted by the scientific community. It has even filtered its way down to the intro chemistry level in universities. Moreover, it is easily understood from a chemical perspective; there isn’t a lot of fancy statistical fudging going on here…
Now * there’s * and enlightened attitude.
“Gee, I’m almost surely wrong about my ill-informed opinion, but I’ll continue to believe it anyway because I don’t care enough to inform myself”.
Here’s a clue: if you don’t care and won’t change, keep your ignorance to yourself.
These guys make a pretty good case that global warming isn’t proven, based on satellite and radiosonde balloon measurements:
http://www.vision.net.au/~daly/
Things we know:
We know that the weather varies.
We know about seasons, El Nino and Ice ages.
We know that the temperatures have varied considerably in the past 1000 years, so much so that the Vikings were able to grow wheat and barley on Iceland around 900 AD. (Check out http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/ice/lec19/lec19.htm for more details. It’s a history site, not an anti-global warming site. It’s also rather good.)
We know that we have relatively recently come out of a “little ice age” (from 1560-1890.)
We know that volcanoes can have large effects.
We know that the Sun’s output varies by a few percent.
Given all this, it seems fair to say that we DON’T know:
a) if global warming is actually occurring
b) if the weather is getting worse than it used to be
c) if it’s our fault if (a) or (b) are happening
d) if we can, or should, be doing anything about it
What we should be doing is more RESEARCH. Trying to find the answers to these questions. Instead we seem to be implementing policy based on flimsy evidence.
Unfortunately “the environment” has become so politicised that it’s impossible to have a sensible public debate on it at the moment. On one side are the ultra-environmentalists who are the heroes of their own worldview, fighting against the evil rest of the world. On the other are the backlash movements - rabid anti-environmentalists who wouldn’t believe the sky was blue if an environmentalist said so. Finally there is the press, who will always print “We’re All Going to Die!” in preference to “There’s Nothing to Worry About”.
I’ll leave you with a quote from a New Scientist interview with Patrick Moore. He was a founder member of Greenpeace and has a PhD in Ecology. (He also plays a mean xylophone.)
"The environmental movement abandoned science and logic somewhere in the mid-1980s, just as mainstream society was adopting all the more reasonable items on the environmental agenda. This was because many environmentalists couldn’t make the transition from confrontation to consensus, and could not get out of adversarial politics. This particularly applies to political activists who were using environmental rhetoric to cover up agendas that had more to do with class warfare and anti-corporatism than they did with the actual science of the environment. To stay in an adversarial role, those people had to adopt ever more extreme positions because all the reasonable ones were being accepted."
Couldn’t have put it better myself.
Hey! I’m a human, aren’t I? I’m not allowed an opinion based on some gut feeling if I want to? At least I admitted it, for pete’s sake, no need to get so snarky!
The reason I don’t care is because it is TOTALLY beyond the scope of myself to change anything other than my own personal habits. Will it make a blind bit of difference in the long-term scheme of things? I seriously doubt it.
Who said I won’t change? I didn’t say that. Look, science goes way over my head very easily when it starts quoting statistics and chemical compositions. I just can’t grasp it. However, people’s reactions to hype and statistics is another matter - that I can judge very easily and accurately, and I say there’s a lot of hysteria mixed in with the facts, and it’s very deeply ingrained.
Ooh ooh, fun fact time. One thing I remember from my Atmospheric Chemistry course was that the greenhouse gas with the most potential for harm is water. I would explain it, but my notes are now half a world away (literally). It has something to do with the carbon dioxide absorbing nearly all the available infra red light from the sun (that it can, each molecule having distinct absorbtion bands), wheras there is a lot of infra red light going out which the water could absorb. However, these are only relevent as there is a lot more of these molecules than man made ones.
ANd on another ‘fact’ that I keep seeing around the place (for the anti global warming camp) is that a green group requested all this information from NASA satellites to show the world was warming up, but that the data showed the earth was actually cooling. This was from a heavily pro industry paper (we don’t need trees type thing). There were no cites or references for this either.
Perhaps the world is getting warmer. Big deal. I live in western PA. Western PA use to be a tropical rain forest, hence the coal, shale, and oil. Climates change, some think we are coming out of an ice age. Yes some animals will die do to the climate change but it is this change that drives evolution. New species will evolve to fill in the niches (sp). Change is good. Shake things up a little.
Question is…would humans survive a severe climate change? Or, for a moderate/minor climate change…are we prepared/willing to accept the consequences?
I’m on the side of caution and observation, not alarm.
We’ve had an atmosphere for hundreds of millions of years, so my bet is that it’s a fairly stable and self-correcting system, despite the stresses we might put on it. In fact, perhaps the Earth is struggling to compensate for our industrial stresses, like a scuba diver’s body compensating for hundreds of feet of water pressure. If we put an immediate halt to the progress, then we might “pop” like the diver coming up too fast.
In fact, I’m pro-global warming, on the micro scale. I would love to see Florida become a true tropical zone with rain forests.
Unless, of course, the caps melt so much that FLA sinks, in which case I’ll have to buy land in the foothills of the Carolinas to get my beach front property.
Seeing as we are still comin out of the tale end of an ice-age, shouldn’t we be experiencing global warming naturally?