What is Global Warming?

[jerrywickey]

What am I missing here?

 

 

This graph clearly shows that the earth is currently at the coldest it has ever been and the CO2 levels don't correlate with global temperatures nearly as much as people are worried about.

 

It also shows that we are very due for a much larger temperature rise than anyone is talking about. Both humans and animals will adapt to the temperature when the earth returns to its apparently more normal hotter temperature. Human civilization may be a different story.

 

Can anyone fill me in? What is the global warming, humans are doing it, fuss all about? If this graph is correct, it really doesn't look like we have a chance of stopping it and we sure didn't cause it.

 

The million year ride back to the more normal 22 Celsius will be a rough ride, probably replete with cold and hot spells. Periods of calm and periods of incredible climate upheaval. Some lasting ten years, some a hundred years and some ten thousand years. But all inevitable, none the less. We are clearly overdue for this rise to what looks like the earth's preferred temperature.

 

Jerry

[iNow]

What am I missing here?

Cause.

[D H]

What am I missing here?

You are missing that our modern society is a lot more fragile than is the environment as a whole. You will here this message if you listen to the more reasoned members of the global warming community. The media is more likely to pay attention to the less-than-reasonable but more vocal members of this community. Their rantings make better press. Some of these more members warming crowd do not particularly like humanity. They talk instead about the damage global warming will do to polar bears and frogs.

 

Life will survive whatever we dish out. Modern society on the other hand is very fragile. A significant number of people live in areas that might well be inundated by rising seas. We will find it hard to feed 6.6 billion mouths if the climate changes much at all. We are "nine meals from anarchy."

 

By way of analogy, farmers in the 1930s used very poor land management techniques. These techniques coupled with drought led to significant erosion and soil loss. Did farmers point to the Grand Canyon and proclaim that nature is much worse than anything they did? Of course not. They changed their ways, and human-induced erosion has decreased as a result.

 

Humanity would not survive a catastrophe that pales in comparison to the Chicxulub impact or the Siberian Traps volcanism. These extinction-level events the death of 90+ percent of all extant species of life. Pointing at the Grand Canyon to make human-induced erosion look small in comparison is a red herring. So is showing graphs of immense changes in the climate over geological ages that include extinction-level events to make human-induced global warming look small.

[bascule]

Let's start with the thread topic...

 

What is Global Warming?

 

"Global warming" is a colloquial term describing an observed multi-decadal increase in the global mean surface temperature.

 

What is the global warming, humans are doing it, fuss all about?

 

Climate scientists largely agree that warming in recent decades is primarily due to human influence. Their opinion comes from intense scientific research into the matter.

 

If this graph is correct, it really doesn't look like we have a chance of stopping it and we sure didn't cause it.

 

The graph isn't on a timescale from which you could even begin to infer variabilities on the order of a human lifespan. All of human civilization is smaller than the column of black pixels on the far edge of the graph.

 

The time period in which humans began to drive the warming trend would be microscopic.

[Chris C]

Chris wonders where the error bars are on temperature and CO2 levels on this graph?? Given that there are errors on scales of 1000-3000 ppmv when you go back tens to hundreds of millions of years (see graph on pg. 441- http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf ) , and paleotemperatures have their own uncertainty (further on the dataset has only a very poor temporal resolution for many intervals), it's hard to take this graph (and what it is trying to imply) seriously.

 

Trying to get information from such a graph for purposes of human-released CO2 impacts on temperature is strange enough. You need to be very careful about high-frequency versus low-frequency changes, and as others have mentioned, discuss causes...not just the detection process. The currently accepted idea seems to be that CO2 is the most important "knob" for changes in climate over geologic time.

[shakira]

Global warming refers solely to the fact that the Earth's atmosphere is warming near its surface. Simply put, it's getting hotter. The term does not imply a cause or speak to cause. The scientific community believes climate changes like global warming have occurred throughout Earth's history and will continue to occur in the future. Some evidence links global warming to solar activity; however, there are other theories as well.

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shakira janet

Edited September 17, 2008 by YT2095
url removed (AGAIN)

[Julius Ahiekpor]

Global warming is an average increase in the earth's surface temperature. It's largely due to human activities.