Global Warming, Where do you stand? Poll

Is Global Warming a real thing and happening? Is it Human Caused?


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DutchMuch

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The Netflix documentary Chasing Coral, which you have probably heard about or already watched shows the effects of global warming and climate change on our planet. While many scientists and others are on board with this, there are still some Non believers. So, where do you stand on this topic? Is climate change/global warming real? Or simply a hoax? Or just a cycle that our planet is currently going through naturally? Vote and discuss!
 

DutchMuch

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Ill start as an example;
By the standard of recent years, global cooling predictions and natural explanations for climate change are controversial, even outlandish. By the broader standard of the last century of science -- and the centuries that preceded it -- what's outlandish is attributing massive changes in climate to increases in carbon dioxide, a trace gas that represents so miniscule a fraction of our atmosphere that it must be measured in parts per million. Established science had historically held natural forces to drive climate.
There is no way to know if temperatures are currently "rising", because natural year-to-year variability in global temperature is so large, with warming and cooling occurring all the time. What we can say is that surface and lower atmospheric temperature have risen in the last 30 to 50 years, with most of that warming in the Northern Hemisphere. Also, the magnitude of recent warming is somewhat uncertain, due to problems in making long-term temperature measurements with thermometers without those measurements being corrupted by a variety of non-climate effects. But there is no way to know if temperatures are continuing to rise now…we only see warming (or cooling) in the rearview mirror, when we look back in time.

In conclusion; I don't think humans are having a significant impact on climate change.
 
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1.) Our planet experiences natural climactic changes.
2.) We have exacerbated the current climate.
3.) Climate Science, as with all disciplines, is never perfect but perfection can never be a prerequisite to action or understanding.
4.) Skepticism is always healthy when it is driven by knowledge and supported by facts.
5.) Skeptics within populations of trained scientists will always exist and will always be expected.
6.) The existence of skeptical climatologists will never constitute an acceptable reason for denial of evidence.
7.) The overwhelming consensus of publicly-funded research is well above any conceivable minimum needed to take major climate theories seriously.
8) As with all fields of science notoriety, prestige and funding are constant motivating factors to prove current understandings wrong.
9.) Current understandings continue to draw strong supporting evidence despite these motivations to prove them false.
10.) As with all fields of science, any motivations to "hoax" a population are nonexistent within developed democratic societies with access to information and open communication.
11.) A simple reference of "Occam's Razor" can show any proposed "hoax" to be unsustainably complicated and socially improbable.
12.) Propensities and motivating factors behind accusations of "hoaxes" from within the lay population are typically associated with anxiety associated with feelings of societal inadequacy, embarrassment associated with a perceived lack of understanding of core issues, natural biases associated with lifestyle conveniences and/or financial/professional entanglements, or fear associated with the alteration of social norms and standards.

My conclusion, given the above arguments, is that human-influenced climate change is the most sensible assumption. Unless an unthinkable amount of peer-reviewed data becomes available, I am forced to remain convinced by existing evidence.
 
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When one person does something on the earth, the effect is tiny.
When a million people do something on the earth, the effect is still tiny.
When several billion people do something on the earth, the effect is huge, changing the balance of the entire organism called earth.
Carbon dioxide and global warming are symptoms, too many people are the disease. Our mother earth is running a fever!
 
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To Dutch's comment about CO2, the explanation is contained here at the top of the article.
Also, "outlandish" is relative. Averages may seem wobbly but they aren't falling down. The acceleration of averages over 120 years combined with chemical signatures is more than enough.
To Stephen's point about population levels, it depends on the lifestyles of those individuals at any given moment. The earth can easily sustain, without damage, 20 billion Icelanders, Norwegians, Swedes, Costa Ricans, Singaporeans and Cubans. They lead the world in minimal impact-per-capita. It's not the number, it's how they live.
 

ZEROPILOT

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Where I stand will be in a foot or two of water.
I live on a peninsula and between the ocean and the everglades.
 

DutchMuch

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To bad we didn't get more responses! thought this would be a really fun thing to do :)
 
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DutchMuch

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We had this discussion last winter, and it wound up getting locked.
I think some of us are still a bit burned out from it...;)

https://www.gardenpondforum.com/threads/what-are-your-thoughts-on-global-warming.20429/

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We have learned not to discuss any topic that may have religious or political facets. -

oooooooh.
hm.
Well that's boring as poop but I guess I understand (not really) LOL.

Global warming isn't political though? or religious?
"Global warming is not political. It's being confused for politics because one side says it's man-made and the other refuses to agree with the opposing side. It's an unfortunate part of politics. If one side mentions something that they support, supporters of the other side will instantly push against it. It's one of the reasons I'm not on any side of politics." says JBtheExplorer.
which I agree with.
 
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Most recent tidbit of global warming factoid I came cross (avert your eyes if allergic to charts and facts)
 

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DutchMuch

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Wait I just saw, someone said "Greek" in the other old thread and becky shut the thread down asap..
At least it made for a good read.
Oh well freedom of speech :( bye bye.

Anyway im going to add more logs to the fire ;)
Climate change is real and has happened throughout history on local, regional, continent-wide, and global scales, driven by a variety of atmospheric, cosmic, geologic, and meteorological factors.
Beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, some scientists—and later environmental lobbyists and politicians—began to worry Earth was changing in ways detrimental to humans and the environment. As Earth cooled modestly from the 1940s through the late 1970s, scientists began to warn of—and headlines began to trumpet—the coming of the next ice age.
By the 1980s, however, the purported problem shifted, and scientists and environmentalists began to warn human-created greenhouse-gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide resulting from burning fossil fuels, are warming the planet and that global warming would cause all manner of catastrophic climate changes—unless humans take extreme actions to stop it.
What We Know
Below, briefly, are the facts about greenhouse gasses and the purported human-caused global warming/climate change:

  • Greenhouse gasses trap heat, making Earth habitable.
  • Water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas, making up 97–98 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide and other trace greenhouse gases make up just 2–3 percent of all greenhouse gasses, and the share of carbon dioxide produced by humans is just a fraction of that.
  • Earth came out of what some scientists refer to as the “Little Ice Age” in the early- to mid-1800s, decades before there was a rise in carbon-dioxide emissions, a pattern that historical analyses show is normal.
  • Humanity’s share of carbon-dioxide emissions grew dramatically, beginning in the middle of the 20th century, with increasing industrialization.
  • Although there are concerns about the soundness and consistency of the global system for measuring temperatures and disputes over possible data manipulation by various governments (due to the differences between measured and reported temperatures), the global average temperature has risen modestly since the 1880s, by about 1.4 degrees F, with approximately 40–50 percent of that warming occurring before the growth in greenhouse gases from human sources began.
Beyond these few statements, almost every other aspect of the climate change controversy is open to debate.
Differences between the claims made by those who believe in the theory human greenhouse-gas emissions significantly affect the climate and the actual measured changes strongly indicate humans are not causing a climate Armageddon and that climate alarmists’ theory is incorrect. In fact, based on the evidence, at the worst, humans are having a modest effect on Earth’s climate, with the increase in carbon dioxide possibly having a net beneficial effect (due to the enhanced plant productivity resulting from higher carbon-dioxide levels.)

Climate Models
There is no question humans have changed the climate on a regional scale—and not always for the better. In some places, deforestation and slash-and-burn farming have resulted in shifting rainfall patterns, flooding, and desertification. And where megacities have developed, ecosystems that previously existed no longer do, changing the course of rivers, draining underground aquifers, causing land subsidence, and contributing to flooding.

However, the evidence suggests human greenhouse-gas emission are having a limited impact on global climate, with virtually all the alarmists’ model predictions routinely failing to match reality. Anthropogenic warming theorists’ climate models assume temperatures should climb alongside rising carbon-dioxide levels, yet temperatures fell from the 1940s through the 1970s, even while emissions were rising dramatically. For the past two decades, carbon-dioxide levels have continued to increase, but global satellites have recorded no significant temperature increase for 18 years.

According to the average of all climate models, Earth’s temperature should be one degree F warmer now than what is currently being measured. The gap between measured temperatures and predictions is most likely due to the fact Earth is less sensitive to additional molecules of greenhouse gases than calculated by most climate models.

Climate models have assumptions built into their design concerning the secondary effects of carbon dioxide on Earth’s atmosphere, which they assume will enhance or amplify Earth’s warming. Simpler models that don’t build in these secondary effects track actual temperatures much more closely than the complex models do, and it’s the complex models upon which climate disaster projections are built.

Failed Predictions

Almost all the harmful impacts predicted by climate models are failing to materialize. For instance, climate models predicted more intense hurricanes, but for nearly a decade, the United States has experienced far fewer hurricanes making landfall than the historic average, and those hurricanes that have made landfall have been no more powerful than previously experienced.

Additionally, while scientists have claimed anthropogenic warming should cause sea levels to rise at increasing rates—because of melting ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica and the thermal expansion of water molecules under warmer conditions—sea-level rise has slowed. Sea levels have always risen between ice ages or during interglacial periods. Indeed, sea levels have risen more than 400 feet since the end of the last interglacial period. However, the rate of sea-level rise since 1961 (approximately one-eighth of an inch per year) is far lower than the historic average (since the end of the previous ice age), and sea-level rise has not increased appreciably over the past century compared to previous centuries. Also, measured seal-level rise is well below the rise predicted by those climate models claiming sea levels would increase because of anthropogenic warming.

While some locations have experienced dramatic sea-level rise and unexpected flooding, the reason is not anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions; it’s often because of other human causes. For instance, in many of these locations, land subsidence—due to increased withdrawals from shore adjacent to aquifers—is the problem.

Further, many people are now building in locations prone to flooding—such as in areas near wetlands and in marshy areas, which historically mitigated or buffered mainland locations from flooding. There are a variety of reasons this is happening, but one of the most important is many government insurance programs (and other government programs, too) subsidize building in areas prone to flooding or hurricane damage.

Based on climate models’ projections of land and ecosystem shifts and changes, biologists have predicted anthropogenic warming would cause numerous plant and wildlife extinctions, yet they have been unable to point to a single instance of a species going extinct due to human-caused climate change thus far.

For instance, although sea ice in the Arctic has declined over the past 20 years, polar bears—which various scientists predicted would be driven to extinction due to declining sea-ice levels (shrinking sea ice limits their ability to capture seals)—have proven highly adaptable. Their populations have grown dramatically over the past 60 years, from approximately 5,000 bears in the 1950s to more than 25,000 today. In the few locations in which populations have declined, temperatures have been cooler, not warmer than average, during the past few decades.

Scientists have also claimed anthropogenic climate change is causing the oceans to warm and become more acidic. They point to widespread coral bleaching and coral reef “deaths” as proof and as a warning of the worsening conditions that will come if the global warming problem isn’t solved immediately. However, as with the alleged polar-bear extinction crisis, the rumors of coral reefs’ deaths have been greatly exaggerated. Coral reefs evolved during and survived through several more-dramatic climate shifts than the one the world is currently undergoing, and they have proven much more resilient than climate alarmists have claimed.

Pollution, not climate change, has harmed many reefs, but in those cases, as with other reefs that bleached in recent years for reasons that have yet to be explained, researchers have found many reefs are recovering and now have new corals forming. While newspapers are calling this recovery miraculous, I prefer to think of it as further evidence we know little about many features of the natural world. Anyone who thinks he or she can attribute the harm caused to ecosystems or their component species to the single factor of human-caused climate change is suffering from extreme hubris.

Contradicting climate models once again, Antarctica is gaining tens of thousands of tons of ice each year, even as some ice-shelves collapse. In addition, in the past few years, despite a warmer world, sea-ice extent in Antarctica has repeatedly grown at a rapid pace, smashing previous records several times.

And while some climate pessimists point to a few outlier research papers claiming climate change will lead to a decline—or even an outright collapse—of major agricultural crops, mainstream agronomists are optimistic about the agricultural outlook under altered climate conditions. After all, most of the world’s plants evolved during periods when global carbon-dioxide levels were much higher than they are today or are expected to be in the foreseeable future. As carbon dioxide has increased, plant life—both agricultural and non-agricultural plants—has become more fecund, with crop production regularly setting records year over year.

The latter should not be a surprise, as agronomists have long recognized carbon dioxide acts as a plant fertilizer, which is why they artificially increase it in greenhouses. Under higher-carbon-dioxide conditions, plants grow faster, more abundantly, and use water more efficiently. Only climate pessimists firmly caught up in the grips of their flawed theory could fail to foresee this beneficial outcome of growing carbon-dioxide levels.

An Always-Changing Climate

In his brilliant book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, Alex Epstein writes:

“Climate is no longer a major cause of death, thanks in large part to fossil fuels. … Not only are we ignoring the big picture by making the fight against climate danger the fixation of our culture, we are “fighting” climate change by opposing the weapon that has made it dozens of times less dangerous. The popular climate discussion has the issue backward. It looks at man as a destructive force for climate livability, one who makes the climate dangerous because we use fossil fuels. In fact, the truth is the exact opposite; we don’t take a safe climate and make it dangerous; we take a dangerous climate and make it safe.”

Earth’s climate is changing, as it always has, but humanity’s role in that change and whether it will produce great harms or, on balance, net benefits is very much open to debate. At the same time, there is no question fossil-fuel use makes us wealthier, and wealthier societies are better able to anticipate, mitigate, adapt, and respond to the vagaries of climate change, regardless of the cause or type of change.
By. H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D
 

DutchMuch

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The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), a coalition of 140+ climate scientists, economists, and engineers, in the "Core Principles" section of its website (accessed May 17, 2017), wrote:

"Global climate is always changing in accordance with natural causes and recent changes are not unusual...

Science is rapidly evolving away from the view that humanity's emissions of carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gases' are a cause of dangerous climate change...

Climate models used by the IPCC [United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] fail to reproduce known past climates without manipulation and therefore lack the scientific integrity needed for use in climate prediction and related policy decision-making...

Claims that 'consensus' exists among climate experts regarding the causes of the modest warming of the past century are contradicted by thousands of independent scientists...

Research that identifies the Sun as a major driver of global climate change must be taken more seriously...

Carbon dioxide and other 'greenhouse gas' emissions from human activity - energy production, transportation, cement production, heating and cooling, etc.- appear to have only a very small impact on global climate."


William Happer, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Princeton University and former Director of Energy Research at the US Department of Energy, in a Feb. 7, 2017 opinion piece for the Post Bulletin titled "William Happer: Climate Change Is Being Used as a Political Hobgoblin," wrote:

"Climate has been changing since the Earth was formed - some 4.5 billion years ago. Climate changes on every time scale - whether decades, centuries or millennia.

The climate of Greenland was warm enough for farming around the year 1100 A.D., but by 1500, the Little Ice Age drove Norse settlers out...

But none of the climate change of the past was due to humans. The very minor warming in the past few centuries is mostly from non-human causes as well… Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but much less important than the major greenhouse gas, water vapor, H2O, and clouds.

Observations, including the extended 'hiatus' in warming since about the year 2000 - which is poised to continue now that the El Nino warming of 2015-2016 is behind us - show that more atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause only modest warming of the Earth's surface.

Many sincere people, without the time or training to dig into the facts, have been misled by the demonization of carbon dioxide.

This seems to be a recurrent feature of human history. In past centuries, some of the most educated members of society wrote learned books on how to ferret out witches and presided in trials where witches were condemned to death.

There never was a threat from witches, and there is no threat from increasing carbon dioxide."

Feb. 7, 2017 - William Happer, PhD



Patrick Moore, PhD, Chair and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. and former Director of Greenpeace International, stated the following in his Feb. 25, 2014 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee testimony "Natural Resource Adaptation: Protecting Ecosystems and Economies," available at epw.senate.gov:

"There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists...

When modern life evolved over 500 million years ago, CO2 was more than 10 times higher than today, yet life flourished at this time. Then an Ice Age occurred 450 million years ago when CO2 was 10 times higher than today. There is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia. The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming."
Richard S. Lindzen, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), stated the following in his article, "Climate of Fear: Global Warming Alarmists Intimidate Dissenting Scientists into Silence," Wall Street Journal, Apr. 12, 2006:

"There have been repeated claims that this past year's hurricane activity was another sign of human-induced climate change. Everything from the heat wave in Paris to heavy snows in Buffalo has been blamed on people burning gasoline to fuel their cars, and coal and natural gas to heat, cool and electrify their homes. Yet how can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global mean temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes?...

Global temperature has risen about a degree since the late 19th century; levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have increased by about 30% over the same period; and CO2 should contribute to future warming. These claims are true. However, what the public fails to grasp is that the claims neither constitute support for alarm nor establish man's responsibility for the small amount of warming that has occurred... It isn't just that the alarmists are trumpeting model results that we know must be wrong. It is that they are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right as justifying costly policies to try to prevent global warming."

John R. Christy, PhD, M.Div, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, provided the following testimony on Aug. 1, 2012 before the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, available at epw.senate.gov:

"It is popular again to claim that extreme events, such as the current central US drought, are evidence of human-caused climate change. Actually, the Earth is very large, the weather is very dynamic, and extreme events will continue to occur somewhere, every year, naturally…

New discoveries explain part of the warming found in traditional surface temperature datasets. This partial warming is unrelated to the accumulation of heat due to the extra greenhouse gases, but related to human development around the thermometer stations...

Widely publicized consensus reports by 'thousands' of scientists are misrepresentative of climate science, containing overstated confidence in their assertions of high climate sensitivity...

...[C]limate models overestimate the response of temperature to greenhouse gas increases. Also shown was a lack of evidence to blame humans for an increase in extreme events. One cannot convict CO2 of causing any of these events, because they've happened in the past before CO2 levels rose...

It is a simple fact that CO2 is plant food and the world around us evolved when levels of CO2 were five to ten times what they are today. Our green world is a consequence of atmospheric CO2. And, food for plants means food for people. The extra CO2 we are putting into the atmosphere not only invigorates the biosphere, but also enhances the yields of our food crops. This is a tremendous benefit to nature and us in my view..."

Aug. 1, 2012 - John Christy, PhD, M.Div



Willie Soon, PhD, Physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, stated the following in his Nov. 2007 article "Implications of the Secondary Role of Carbon Dioxide and Methane Forcing in Climate Change: Past, Present, and Future," published in Physical Geography:

"There is no quantitative evidence that varying levels of minor greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 have accounted for even as much as half of the reconstructed glacial-interglacial temperature changes or, more importantly, for the large variations in global ice volume on both land and sea over the past 650kyr [650,000 years]. This paper shows that changes in solar insolation [amount of solar energy hitting the earth] at climatically sensitive latitudes and zones exceed the global radiative forcings [greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere traping solar heat] of CO2 and CH4 by severalfold...

[T]he popular notion of CO2 and CH4 radiative forcing as the predominant amplifier of glacial-interglacial phase transitions cannot be confirmed…

Our basic hypothesis is that long-term climate change is driven by insolation changes, from both orbital variations and intrinsic solar magnetic luminosity variations. This implies natural warming and cooling variations."

Nov. 2007 - Willie Soon, PhD



etc
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