*Disclosure - I am an environmental scientist by training (and did ~2 years as an environmental consultant)

Global warming is real. If you look at the works of most scientists who act objectively (i.e. not funded by oil companies, not funded by the greenies), you will notice a trend that says that greenhouse gasses do, in fact, have an effect on our global environment. Example - Most recently there have been studies that show the coral reefs in many areas have been dying (bleaching) due to increased levels of toxins in the water (including CO2).

Let's for a second look at the trend of temperature increases and decreases on earth. The argument that the earth was significantly warmer in the past is just wrong (at times). There is a cyclical nature to global temperature change, usually fairly gradually over about 11,000 years. So, 11,000 years ago we had an ice age, and about 11,000 years before that another ice age, and so on. The fact that we are in a period where temperature decline should be taking place, but is not, indicates to me (and others) that there is some external force causing heat to be trapped within our ecosystem. Evidence is the record temperatures seen over the past couple of years, the receding polar ice caps, the shifting thermocline in the atlantic ocean, etc. I read an article last year that predicted the severity of the hurricane season because the Caribbean was about 5 degrees warmer than average last April/May. Then came Katrina and Rita. Trends in temperature change have been the same for billions of years, so why are they changing now?

Why people think that the actions of man has no effect on the environment it beyond me, but I do understand that most people don't have a background like mine, so its unfair to compare. So, let me use an analogy akin to what car nuts like us can visualize. Let's imagine an oval track where cars can race in perpetuity, and have been doing so for the past 4 Billion years. We'll call it the Indy Infinity. So, throughout the race there are certain things that will affect the pace of the group - cars crash, run out of gas, rain, etc. The speed of the pack will increase and decrease throughout the cycles of re-fueling, tire changes, crashes, etc. However, there will be a natural return to the average speed and movement of cars over time. Let's look at this situation as the global ecosystem sans man's influence. Now, this has been going on for about 4 billion years, but in the past few thousand years someone has added an elevation change, then a chicane, then adds an infield section of the track. These are the actions of man. The normal cycles of speeding up and slowing down of the cars are going to be affected. The drivers will do their best to adapt/compensate, but simply cannot keep up their average speed compared to the past. That is what is happening now. The environment is doing its best to adapt, but what is happening now is far, far different from anything that has ever occurred in the past 4 billion years. Cause and effect. The actions of man most certainly have an effect on the environment around us, and it is certainly not a positive effect if we maintain sustainable living conditions.

Sorry for the long post. I actually wanted to add more hard science, but figured that nobody would read my rants anyway. I won't get into the politics of whether or not burning fossil fuels by SUVs, China, or the United States has an effect on the environment, and who has the right to burn how much. I'll just leave it at ALL advances made by our nation or others in reduction of greenhouse gasses cannot be a bad thing.

 

Data I have found shows there was a dip in temperature at the end of the Tertiary period (or Miocene if you would rather, coinciding with the end of the dinosaurs and beginning of an ice age) that persisted through the Pleistocene until today. But prior to that looks like about 200 million years of warmer temperatures. It does look like what you are talking about is the last 5 or 6 million years which is what I noted in my early post.

I don

 

What's the source of the data you have found?

Again, this is far more important than temperature drops over time, and what tempertures used to be 2 billion years ago. What happened that far back is completely irrelevent to today. We're talking about humans today and in the future. We're talking about our habitat today and in the future. We're talking about the world peoples' children will be living in.

The past you speak of was uninhabitable by us. It has no bearing on the argument for global warming, because it has nothing to do with the habitat we were born in. Global warming concerns itself with what has happened in the last 200 years that is negatively affecting the environment. A very clear trend points toward humans causing the increase in temperatures.

Seriously, read Al Gore's book, or see the movie, or both. He doesn't just spout things out of thin air. He uses diagrams, charts, pictures, data, all forms of information transferrance to make his point very clearly.

 

Here is one of the easiest to follow, but there are many sites and publications that have the same data.

http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

You will find most publications focus on the past 100,000 years and those that go further back can have some uncertainty as they are modeling climate from sediment and floral data and considering continental drift.

The reason you would look at the distant past and not just the recent data is to try to understand the system, not just the recent variations. Large changes, like continental drift, the magnetic pole reversals, orbital variations, etc. were missed until recently and there are probably many other factors to discover.

 

Warning. Big steaming load.

 

Lets hope that YOU don't end up choking on your own BIG STEAMING LOAD.. @ss

 

I notice you didn't say how exactly.

Telling that.

 

OK cdelena, I'm REALLY sorry to have to do this publicly, but look at this link that is part of that website: The Present-day world has well defined climatic zones

Your source, Mr. Scotese, doesn't even agree with you. I quote directly from that page: "...Global climate is warming because we are leaving an Ice Age and because we are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere."

I must confess that I again do not see the logic in the derivation of your opinion based on that information from that source, assuming he hadn't said that part about GW. I looked over that site, but all it does is tell me where major minerals occurred, how continents shifted, and where the general climate zones were (which has remained essentially unchanged since as far back as the Cambrian Explosion, likely do to the Earth's solar orbit and its natural rotation and axes of alignment). Indeed the very first image on that website seems to be disproving your point.

You seem to be arguing that there is a system behind Earth changes that is somewhat cyclical in the sense that it is predictable, if only we had enough data to show that is so. The problem is, we don't have the ability to gether that data at present. Also, 2 billion years of data is a full 50% of the data we need according to your line of thinking. I don't know about you, but that's a pretty damn good glimpse at the past, and countless scientific advances have taken place with far less known about the inherent science. 50% of the story isn't the whole story, but it's going to have plenty of plot revealed by that point.

Mr. Scotese's diagram of the temperature fluctuations since Cambria to now does not show any form of predictable consistency. Indeed it shouldn't, because the Earth has gone through unbelievable changes and shifts in climate due to forces both "homegrown" and external. Large asteroids hitting Earth is one prominent example of something that causes unpredictability, as is the shifting of the continents themselves based on tectonic movement and volcanic activity.

Your argument also seems to suggest that the Earth would actually at one point in the "cycle" 3-4 billion years ago have been quite hospitable for humans, but that is very much not the case, because the planet's surface was ravaged for untold millenia with volcanic activity even the Bible couldn't dream up, and lack of an atmosphere. If the data we had now pointed towards an Earth like that, I'd understand where you're coming from, but when you look at the story from Earth's formation to now in mental pictures, you see the story of an ember of the Big Bang burning, than cooling, then living...that's inherently a linear path, as opposed to a cyclical occurrence.

Mr. Scotese's diagram shows that many times it is in the middle of cooling when something - again, like a huge asteroid - causes things to go in the opposite direction when they were trending in another. If the whole thing looked like a relatively consistent sine wave, I'd see your point...but the intervals are completely unpredictable. It's the geologic form of climatic Jeet Kune Do.

Is the climate a cycle of *some*? Of course it is; It's part of nature. But again we are the first naturally-occurring phenomena on this planet that can AT WILL control nature one way or the other. Our population explosion has very much to do with the GW story. We've exploded into cars, into industries, into atomic power, into unexplored areas, into roles nature hadn't thought of for us...hell, men can't stop exploding between womens' legs!

All that exploding release a lot of heat, both figuratively and physically.

 

the earth wobbles on its axis. The earth's orbit is not perfect - it varies the distance to the sun season to season, year to year, millenia to millenia. The sun's output varies, year by year, century to century, millenia to millenia. These three things impact world climate in cylces too complex to accurately predict, but the impact is, at times, catastrophic for some species. Man has been pumping Co2 into the air at a great rate for something like 200 years. The sky is certainly not falling simply because this year is not the same as last year, or some year 200,000 years ago. It seems more than a little ignorant to assume climates are inherently stable. Climates change, regardless of what we do. Yes, it might be possible for humanity to have an impact, but that impact is no different that the impact of periods of increased volcanic activity or the amount of solar radiation received by earth. Human-driven changes need to be dealt with, and mitigated if possible, but change will occur regardless of what humanity does.

That said, I see no reason to continually increase the crap we pump into the air. I drive past a really, really tall stack blowing smoke, conclude the stuff coming out of that stack must be something they want to keep people from breathing, and wonder WTF? If the shit is so bad, why is it being pumped into our air in the first place? There are stricter laws governing what can be dumped into a lake or river than what you can let loose in the air for us all to breathe unknowingly. It certainly shouldn't take a Chicken Little to make us push for change.

 

Get a Terrapass folks if you want to do something about Global Warming. I don't know if can save the earth but this is at least the step in the right direction.

www.terrapass.com