Global Warming

[Lief]

What's your take on it?

It's total [censored] nowadays, we are having February weather in December. (I live in NY)

Huge pic is huge.
As you can see, it is dropping again. Some record lows have even been broke!

[Holy_458]

*cough*

Excuse me...

[Wynni]

Ooookay, let's break it down to what it really is: climatic shifts. Humans are everywhere, humans impact the land, air, water, and everything else around them to an extent not seen in nature excepting meteor strikes and major tectonic upheavals.


Now, just because people call it 'global warming' folks are thinking we're gonna experience an endless summer or some such nonsense like that.

No.

What we are going to have is unseasonal temperatures, (Hawaii under snow, anyone? Sunbathing in Alaska? Who knows at this point.)

Now, the earth's temperatures have always fluctuated. Until Panama sinks beneath the waves, we are, in fact, still in an Ice Age, or so some experts claim.

The earth has experienced major climatic shifts, from tropic swamps to iceball. It's all there recorded in the geologic record. Life continued, because species had time and space to change with them, or refuges to retreat to and wait the changes out. That luxury doesn't exist anymore, because we've taken up so much space. Species won't have the time, because we are escalating the changes with the things we have done.

What we need to do is change some of our practices. We need, as a species, to get wiser in our resource use. Alternative sources of energy are available, some better than others. For that matter, petrol does not have to be the horrible carbon dioxide spewer it is. Planting more trees is a great way to combat carbon dioxide. Heck, urban gardens could help. There are many projects to create rooftop gardens out there. It not only makes the place prettier, or provide seasonal treats, but helps combat smog, too.

So yeah, quitcher fussing and fuming, saying it aint so, and do something to fix it.

[Sgt. Pepper]

Global warming is not real. It's liberal propaganda. I do however believe that climate change is occuring, which is something that nature does naturally and humans do speed this process up.

[Graham]

Global warming is not real. It's liberal propaganda. I do however believe that climate change is occuring, which is something that nature does naturally and humans do speed this process up.

Yeah man, all those fat cat scientists are completely trolling the world just for shiggles :p

[Ryusen]

I acknowledge that the global temperature has risen over the past few decades. I also acknowledge that carbon dioxide levels have risen over the pas few decades as well. I acknowledge that carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, has the potential to trap in the suns rays and warm the earth.

I do not buy into the propaganda that we are "killing the earth" with our massive amounts of CO2. While it is certainly a factor, we are just tossing snowballs into the avalanche that is climate change. Our effect is there, and it is measurable, but it is not a critical contributing source. While I wholeheartedly support green-initiative programs, I see it more as a sign of good faith toward the planet than a slam-on-the-brakes necessary change in our economic practices.

Our planet has undergone more drastic and more sudden shifts in the climate before us, and I'm certain it will after us. To attribute our pollution to the rise in temperatures is acceptable. To blame the rise in temperature on our pollution is not.

[Silver Seren]

The idea that the earth is warming at an uncharacteristic rate is fact, so in that sense of "global warming", it most certainly exists. You cannot debate that at all since it is happening. The only issue we have is trying to find the attributing factors to this warmth.

There have been arguments for both sides in every direction, but I feel that humans most definitely play a factor in global warming. You may argue that the earth undergoes natural ups and downs of temperature, which is why we had the Little Ice Age and all of that and you would be right. However, you would be unable to explain the increasing rate of temperature that has been occuring in the past two centuries. The rise in temperature is not related to any other natural shift in all of known history. The earth has never heated up this quickly before.

It is highly likely that carbon dioxide is the culprit, but not the only one. The effect of increasing carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere would not cause the sharp increase that we are seeing. It is in conjunction with deforestation and ozone depletion that these increases are being caused.

One of the main things that most laypeople don't know is that global warming will cause, in turn, global cooling because of the inverse relationship between the two. Once the earth heats up enough that it's own force turns against it, the earth will suddenly cool, sending us into another ice age far faster than would naturally have occurred. A gradual, natural ice age would be something that we could work with and protect ourselves against, but a sudden onset of an ice age could be a problem.

Not to mention that the increasing temperatures are causing the extinction of various species that are situated for only living within set temperature variations. In this manner, global warming will cause the extinction of both heat-intolerable species and cold-intolerable species.

And that's not even counting the issues once the perma-frost and groundsoil ice melt at the poles. Free-roaming glaciers will only cause a set amount of sea level rise, only connected with the amount of the glacier above the water level. But the breakdown of the Arctic land glaciers would certainly cause an increase in sea level, not counting sea water expansion as heat rises. Of course, the heat will likely have to increase a significant amount for this to be noticeable, since water is such a good absorber of heat, but it will happen eventually.

There's my two cents anyhow.

[avwolf]

I have to agree with Ryusen. There's no excusing poor stewardship of the Earth, and, by all means, we should always attempt to take care of it. We should pursue more efficient and "green" ways to generate energy, to farm, to drive transportation. But far too much of the anthropogenic global warming craze is the modern equivalent of the "white man's burden."

Climate change is used too much as a political weapon, particularly considering that the climate is only somewhat understood in the first place. We've got reasonably good records, but we've proven, repeatedly, to be embarrassingly bad at extrapolating accurate predictions out of them, mostly because the Earth is such a remarkably complicated system that we have incredible difficulty in modeling it. We keep predicting positive feedback loops and then discovering that we were exactly wrong and there's a negative feedback loop in place to correct it.

[Sebbie]

Personally, I believe that anthropogenic global warming does exist, and we need to take action to prevent its consequences. Now, yes, I will admit that the global climate is an incredibly complex system that we are far from fully understanding, and I will therefore concede the possibility that I am wrong. However, I believe the evidence we have - the historical correlation between carbon dioxide concentration and global temperatures, the sharp rise in carbon dioxide concentration ever since the Industrial Revolution, current changes in weather patterns - point to a human cause. In any case, like avwolf and Ryusen said, we're always better off going green, even if you don't believe humans are affecting global warming.

[fdhuff2006]

I was going to respond with an educated post to dismiss this idea of "global warming" but i'm tired so ill just say it is a bunch of well B S

[No Clemency]

I'm actually writing an essay for my Freshman English Comp. class on global warming. And I have to say, after researching for days on global warming for the paper, I was sad to find little good information supporting global warming, while tons of information going against global warming. I started this paper biased to global warming being real, and now after all my research, I'm in doubt, I'm sad.

[The Luigiian]

I am shocked that the typically conservative-leaning commentators on this forum are coming out saying they believe in environmental initiatives.



I was going to say something about the lack of "green" 4x4 trucks in the market and how we've decided we'd rather save the trees than save them, but come to think of it that's off topic. So I'll just say global warming is obviously happening and the only question is who's causing it (smart money is on everybody.)

[Wynni]

No Clem, precisely WHAT the deuce barbeque are you using for your sources???
If need be, I'll hunt up some peer reviewed lit for you. sheesh.

[No Clemency]

No Clem, precisely WHAT the deuce barbeque are you using for your sources???
If need be, I'll hunt up some peer reviewed lit for you. sheesh.

Well don't beat up on me. First of all I started this paper believing in global warming, and I just simply researched global warming as much as I could for about 2 days straight, books, newspaper articles, data bases and websites and that is what I found. Of course I found some evidence supporting global warming, but it was so little and at that most of it was countered by skeptics that brought forth other evidence to knock it out. But all the same, I still believe in global warming, I just now think that the process is occurring to slowly to have any drastic affects on our environment, there will be some, but I believe before we see to many drastic changes we would have already run out of fossil fuels to burn there for stopping most of our CO2 emissions. But again, this is just what I got out of researching global warming. Right now, even with how important global warming is, I think there are more significant problems we need to deal with first, like finding alternative sources of energy before we run out of fossil fuels, but all the same, I still believe global warming is something we need to keep a close eye on.

[Sebbie]

But all the same, I still believe in global warming, I just now think that the process is occurring to slowly to have any drastic affects on our environment, there will be some, but I believe before we see to many drastic changes we would have already run out of fossil fuels to burn there for stopping most of our CO2 emissions.

We're already starting to see drastic changes - the breaking up of huge chunks of the Antarctic ice sheets and the meltdown of glaciers over the last century (which has been spelling disaster for mountain-dwelling peoples who get their drinking water from glacial meltwater) are two examples that come immediately to my mind. Once could also argue about the redistribution of precipitation in recent years, the warming of ocean waters that led to Katrina's strength, etc., but those could also be isolated anomalies, so I'd rather not use those as evidence.

Anyway, the other thing to consider is that there's a lag between CO2 release and its effects; even if we were to suddenly halt all CO2 emissions, we'd still see some residual effects from the fossil fuels we've already burned. So even if we didn't see any drastic effects by the time we exhausted all fossil fuels (though I'm willing to bet we would), they'd catch up with us quickly.