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Do you believe in global warming?

F

Freya

New Member
Some argue that the biggest challenge we face today is the threat of global warming. Yet others think that its all a myth and take no action.

Without delving into the politics ( :p ), what do you think? Do you even care, or has it been talked about so much that you've simply switched off?
 
Without going into politics, my belief is that we humans are supremely egotistic to believe that we have any CLUE how the world operates in the long term. Since we cannot yet create any model that can accurately predict backwards in time to a known event, it's foolish to think that we can predict the future --- much less the cause of global warming.

Is there global warming? Yes. Without a doubt. Has global warming happened before in the history of the world? Absolutely. There's evidence from core drills at both poles that our ice covered areas were at one time temperate. There was global warming. There was global cooling to the point of ice ages.

That said, it does no HARM to consider the impact that human presence has on temperature and attempt to "leave no footprint." It DOES do harm to point fingers or limit discussion of that impact only to selected human presences. Either leave NO footprint at all, or let the course run and humans, as a species, will survive or not.

Just my opinion, for what it's worth... :)
 
I'm in the boat with Cathy. Yes, it's real. How much do we have to do with it? That's questionable. The earth is a really complex system. I know that there are organisms in the ocean that change with the temperature to give off more or less gases that affect the global climate. We can't even begin to understand all the swirling gases that make up our atmosphere. Don't forget that the "Little Ice Age" only ended in the 1800s.

Our real problems stem from our lust for energy and metals. We're working on those.
 
Cathy C said:
Is there global warming? Yes. Without a doubt. Has global warming happened before in the history of the world? Absolutely. There's evidence from core drills at both poles that our ice covered areas were at one time temperate. There was global warming. There was global cooling to the point of ice ages.
Click to expand...

As Cathy C has already said, the earth does seem to undergo certain cycles of environmental change, however research suggests that temperatures have been increasing more rapidly since the industrial revolution (the point when carbon dioxide started being released into the atmosphere at a much higher rate then previously experienced). I feel that industrialization has done the earth's atmosphere no favours, but it was a huge step in human evolution & that is something that needs to be acknowledged.

I think that part of the reason people debate the idea of global warming is because they take the term at face value. Global warming tends to lead to more extremes in temperatures & weather conditions, therefore the term can be very misleading. Rex mentioning the problem with the gulf stream is an excellent example of how warming in one place can lead to the opposite elsewhere.
 
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