Global Warming

I know I am preaching to the choir on this topic and that many don’t believe in global warming but I did want to try to state my opinion on the matter. What I love most about global warming is when you ask the average Joe what they know about global warming you get the standard answer something along the lines of “It’s the Earth getting warmer because of us.” Ok, whatever, if that’s what they believe then so be it. Then you follow up that question with "What is causing global warming?" Again, the average Joe will reply "Of course we know what is causing global warming, it's us with all the CO2 that we produce." However, heaven forbid you should ever ask a third follow up question to that such as "How do you know that CO2 is causing global warming?" or "Did you get your source from anywhere besides 'An Inconvenient Truth'?" It's like asking an Obama supporter what he really believes in. "Obama believes in change, and faith, and hope for change, and if he changes Washington, we'll have hope for the future because of change and faith and hope, which hope is placed in faith” and you know the line.

Everyone thinks that ALL scientists agree that global warming is man made. Actually here are the real stats done in a 2003 survey of 530 climate scientists in 27 countries, conducted by Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch at the GKSS Institute of Coastal Research in Germany. They found that

82 percent said global warming is happening, but only
56 percent said it’s mostly the result of human causes, and only
35 percent said models can accurately predict future climate conditions.

Only 27 percent believed “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climate variability on time scales of 100 years.”

This is a far strectch from the "consensus" that everyone is talking about.
This is the main problem, everyone just assumes that the debate on global warming is over and the answer is that we are causing it by producing all this CO2. OK, first let me point out some of my feelings first on the subject. Do I believe the Earth is warming? I do (hesitantly due to recent data that suggest the past 10 years we are actually starting to cool.) but taken into context we are speaking about warming to the tone of a catastrophic increase of .7 degrees C over a 30 year span (not to mention the 30+ years prior to that that all the experts were predicting “Global Cooling” or another Ice Age.

Do I believe that we should try to find a solution to this problem? Yes and no. I do believe we should look into trying to find a solution to this as long as:
A. It is proven that this is a long-term trend
B. It is fixable
C. If it is man made and we do contribute a significant portion to it (which I believe we contribute to it to the tune of around 2% of the total greenhouse gases in the atmosphere).
D. That we are better off in a cooler planet than a warmer one.

Once all of the above premises are reached, I believe that fixing the problem of global warming should number one priority. However, until then I would advise caution from making rash economical, social, and environmental decisions based of supposed “trends” that we see.

Another item that should be noted is that both the temperatures of Venus and Mars have been rising over the same period of time in which the Earth has been warming. Don't just take my word for it, look it up yourself. Venus and Mars' average global temperature has been rising approximately (you have to take into consideration that Venus has a thicker atmosphere and Mars has thinner atmosphere than Earth's.) the same amount as the Earth's temperature. During this same time the activity level of the sun has dramatically increased too. Man if this whole global warming is caused by us, we are doing some serious damage not only our planet but to our whole solar system. Those Martians are going to be livid at us when they find out that we are the cause of their global warming.

One of the faults of the global warming scare is that global warming is a bad thing. It should be pretty evident that global warming might possibly be a good thing for us. Warming can raise ocean levels and lead to droughts. It can also extend growing seasons and increase rain. It all depends on where you are and what forecast you are using. The only common denominator is that most official warming reports, such as those from the UN, spend an inordinate amount of time discussing the negatives and very little time, if any, mentioning positive offsets. One of the reasons for this is that there is a culture in which every environmental activist has been steeped in for years — that man always ruins nature. That everything man does is bad. Growth is bad. Technology is bad. To be fair, its not that many environmental scientists are hiding the positive offsets, it’s that they have been programmed for years to be unable to recognize or acknowledge them.
Have you ever watched a local news station and listen to the meteorologist and hear their 7 day forecast? Why do they stop at 7 days? Why not do a 30 days or a 2 month forecast? The reason is mainly due to the fact that weather is almost impossible to predict that far out. For all the knowledge we have concerning climate change and weather patterns, the predictability of future climate change is almost near impossible. Take the case of global cooling. A lot of the younger generation were not a live during the 1960-70's where if you looked at the media then, it wasn't global warming that was the problem, it was global cooling. They were freaked out that we were heading into a global cooling. For example you have in 1978, the L.A. Times published an article that was titled "No End in Sight to 30-year Cooling Trend in the Northern Hemisphere," or Times Magazine article from 1974 title "Another Ice Age." Everything they were saying then can be said today just replace global warming with global cooling and switch the results. Why were they stating such prediction? It was due to the fact that they were inputting data from their recent history and extrapolating it further and further out without considering the fact that the trend of the previous 30 years could and would change. What is to say that this global warming trend doesn’t change? These climate models are made interesting by the inclusion of "positive feedbacks" (multiplier effects) so that a small temperature increment expected from increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide invokes large increases in water vapor, which seem to produce exponential rather than logarithmic temperature response in the models.

The biggest rebuttal to man made global warming is that in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" he showed this huge graph showing how CO2 levels were causing the temperature to increase. I must admit when I first saw this I was like, hmmm, pretty interesting. The funny thing is that notice that he didn't over lap the two data? The reason he didn't is because had he superimposed the temperature data with the CO2 levels you would have noticed temperature, drives CO2 levels, not the other way around. As the temperature of the Earth increases the CO2 levels then follows shortly thereafter. There is no evidence stating that the increase in CO2 levels drives the temperature.
If all this pollution was driving global warming you would expect that during the peak, during the industrial revolution, that temperatures would have sky rocketed. Funny thing is that the temperature of the Earth actually went down during that time. These are based of the graph and numbers produced by IPCC.

There are plenty of more data that viewpoints that support this position on global warming (I just don't want to make this into a 30 page senior thesis paper) but my whole point of this blog is show that the global warming debate is not over. More importantly is that if we are to try to fix this warming (assuming it continues to increase without ever cooling off, which is not all that plausible) you need to find the REAL source of global warming supported by sound scientific data.