Isn't this exactly the way global warming is supported?

Absolutely, global warming is the greatest scam of our time. You can find 'scientists' to support anything, especially if their funding depends on it. Gore winning the peace prize just proves the extent of corruption of our world. His movie is so full of lies that it cannot even be shown in schools in almost every country except ours.

How could something as small as man ruin our giant world...

70% of the Earth is water so population is outnumbered...

It is an accepted fact that out planet has increased about 1 degree since global temps have been recorded. But so has the sun and every planet in our solar system. Do did we do that too...

Your carbon credit $ is lining the pockets of the rich, esp Gore and his buddy from the UN that invented it. Carbon is necessary for plants to live and follows rising temps, not causes rising temps.

Did anyone notice that California is under snow and ice like never before...

Also record snowfall in China, Isreal, as well as much of the middle east...

It even snowed in Iraq for the first time in like 50 years.

It is snowing outside of my window right now...

I support all (well most) theories, including man made changes because each has some substance. Here is my bucket list: 1. Ocean circulation. The PDO seems to be the dominant ocean current and thus seems to have the most effect on climate. It appears to be in a 25-30 year cycle which does correlate with past temperatures. I do not believe it is the overriding cycle but it significant enough to need to be accounted for. 2. Solar activity. There are several factors in this category: Total Solar Irradiance (TSI), sunspot activity and solar wind/storms. There are two fairly stable cycles of 11 (average) years for sunspots and magnetic activity has an overlaying 22 year cycle. The overall variation of the sun's energy output is beyond my comprehension. I do know that the MWP and Little Ice Age correlate well with observed sunspot numbers. 3. Cosmic Rays. The science in this area just had another boost of credibility with the latest study of Henrik Svensmark. His basic thesis is that more cloud formation occurs when cosmic radiation is higher and more clouds results in greater albedo and thus has a cooling effect. His latest paper mentions aerosols but I haven't read it so I'm not sure how that is correlated. As well, we do know that higher sun activity produces more magnetism which tends to inhibit cosmic radiation and thus cloud formation. This actually highlights that a small increase in solar energy not only increases UV hitting the earth, but there are other positive feedbacks. 4. Man. Obviously man is having some impact on the environment and also the climate. CO2 increases are the most popular aspect but I am coming to believe that land usage is a very underestimated human factor. That includes clearing land for agriculture, deforestation for other purposes and building steel, concrete and ashpalt jungles. Maybe even jet aircraft have some effect. 5. Earths orbital and axis eccentricities. These are likely the very long term cycles that cause us to go from glacials to interglacial periods. I believe they are not a factor over hundreds of years as far as trends. I'm not denying anything. I'm simply skeptical that we can take all the theories about natural cycles and man's influence and reach a conclusion of "very likely" man is resposible for the recent warming. I mean that just seems like jumping the gun given what we don't know. And the logic fallacy I find here is that the IPCC seems to have "picked" CO2 as the the main culprit and now we are in a position where somebody has to prove that it's something else. That's the essence of your question, right? How can anyone say that CO2 is going to cause 4 degrees (or whatever) of warming if they don't know what the climate would be doing without any human influence? I mean if the natural cycle was 4 degrees of cooling over the same time period then we'd want that warming wouldn't we? As far as I can tell we have been told that the earth with warm up 4 degrees by 2050 and that it's bad. It's just not adding up for me. I'm not even sure I think it's bad. You put sea level rise at 18 inches and similar hurricane activity and what have you got that's so bad? But that's a whole other post.

raphael, most of what you're saying is hogwash.

California's precipitation this year is about normal or less. How can the snow be at record levels?

When we have record snow in the Sierras it's on the news all the time. Haven't seen that once this year. And local conditions, or even regional ones, are by no stretch of the imagination indicators of global warming one way or another.The IPCC has made this clear, numerous times. Let alone over a period of time as short as a year.

How can measly little man effect the huge ocean? Ask the 90% of food fish stocks worldwide that no longer are incarnate in the ocean.

Ask the 99% of blue whales who are also no longer incarnate.

Ask sea life that depends on the coral reefs that are deteriorating.

Ask the algae in the middle of the ocean who are engulfed by billions upon billions of tiny plastic particles that are being inadvertently ingested by them. They don't have a choice; they are filter feeders.

Ask the 39 of 67 native fish species in California that are extinct or at risk of extinction.

I'm sure one of the organizations that tracks the health of the oceans could provide hundreds of other similar statistics for you. Jacques Cousteau, the famous undersea explorer and oceonographer said the oceans would be dead in 20 years the way we were damaging it. That was back in the 70s, it's taking slightly longer.

The IPCC has gone over and over the issue of the sun and has shown that if anything, we would be cooling if it weren't for greenhouse gases.

Other planets do not have atmospheres like ours, when they have any at all. Bad comparison.

Sounds like you haven't read any of the information available.

CO2 not causing rising temps is wrong.

"This proves that rising CO2 was not the trigger that caused the initial warming at the end of these ice ages – but no climate scientist has ever made this claim. It certainly does not challenge the idea that more CO2 heats the planet."

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/...

And the IPCC scientists make it very clear that conditions from place to place and from time to time will vary as they always do. Have you ever observed weather fluctuations? In fact they say some places may cool or stay cool even while other places warm. It is the global picture over long periods of time that mean anything. All of this is made very clear. Your comments relate to nothing in the real world of climate science.

Your score = 0

I suggest you go here and learn.

http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/...

It's natural cyclical weather patterns that have been going on for thousands of years. While man may be affecting it a little bit there is no way we can stop it from happening. Of course all the environmentalist and Eco-terrorists will jump on this bandwagon, but they look for any excuse to try to revert our society back to the dark ages. Your best bet to find out the truth about global warming is follow the money. Who is lobbying for it, and against it. I mean Al Gore has made a fortune touring the country giving speeches, I think he gets like 100k per speech or something. These people are using a natural process that we can't stop to further their agenda. These are the same people that wanted gas to be $5 a gallon 10 years ago. I guess they don't want people to be able to go to work and feed their families.

No, global warming is documented in scientific papers that rely on evidence, then are cross-checked by scientist peers who are also staking their professional reputations on the validity of the paper, its evidence, and its conclusions:

No pontification is necessary in the case of science supporting global warming:

http://norvig.com/oreskes.html

The consensus was quantified in a Science study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes (Dec. 2004) in which she surveyed 928 scientific journal articles that matched the search [global climate change] at the ISI Web of Science. Of these, according to Oreskes, 75% agreed with the consensus view (either implicitly or explicitly), 25% took no stand one way or the other, and none rejected the consensus.

For example, scientists (and their peer reviewers) have concluded that global warming has been a serious issue in the past, causing major extinctions on the planet millions of years ago, also due to CO2 emissions:

http://www.killerinourmidst.com/P-T%20boundary.htm...

"An even larger amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) would also have been expelled by Traps volcanism. But in contrast to the sulfate aerosols, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for extended periods of time (centuries), though it decreases slowly over that interval. As a greenhouse gas, it warms the atmosphere, changing ecological conditions. (Deccan Traps volcanism, coming before the end of the Cretaceous, is estimated to have warmed the world by 3° to 5°C, or 5.4° to 9°F; Ravizza and Peucker-Ehrenbrink, 2003.) And because it combines chemically to form carbonic acid, it also produces mildly acidic rain. Acid rain can dissolve calcium carbonate shells, particularly those at or near the ocean surface. Additionally, acid rain leaches vital nutrients from the soil, resulting in plant stunting and death."

Note that the temperature increases referenced are within the range of predictions for what we may see in the next few decades. Apparently we are using the entire planet as one giant science experiment. It will be interesting to see what results we get.

---

Speaking of science fair experiments... don't the ants and fruit flies usually die due to overpopulation, resource depletion, and pollution? Or sometimes someone leave a heat lamp on nearby and the environement gets too hot. Interesting analogy, thanks.

No. There are many basic scientific facts which can only be explained if the current global warming is being caused by an increased greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere from humans burning fossil fuels.

For example, the planet is warming as much or more during the night than day. If the warming were due to the Sun, the planet should warm a lot more during the day when the Sun has influence. Greenhouse gases trap heat all the time, so they warm the planet regardless of time of day. Another example is that the upper atmosphere is cooling because the greenhouse gases trap the heat in the lower atmosphere. If warming were due to the Sun, it would be warming all layers of the atmosphere.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AiYUr...

We know it's warming, and we've measured how much:

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/recenttc_...

Scientists have a good idea how the Sun and the Earth's natural cycles and volcanoes and all those natural effects change the global climate, so they've gone back and checked to see if they could be responsible for the current global warming. What they found is:

Over the past 30 years, all solar effects on the global climate have been in the direction of (slight) cooling, not warming. This is during a very rapid period of global warming.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6290228.stm

http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/media/proceedings_a...

A recent study concluded:

“the range of [Northern Hemisphere]-temperature reconstructions and natural forcing histories…constrain the natural contribution to 20th century warming to be <0.2°C [less than one-third of the total warming]. Anthropogenic forcing must account for the difference between a small natural temperature signal and the observed warming in the late 20th century.”

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/104/10/3713

You can see this in the third graph here, where the dotted lines are just from natural causes, and the full lines are natural + human causes:

http://www.pnas.org/content/vol104/issue10/images/...

If that’s not enough to convince you the Sun isn’t responsible, consider the fact that no scientific study has ever attributed more than one-third of the warming over the past 30 years to the Sun, and most attribute just 0-10% to the Sun.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=ApEBL...

So the Sun certainly isn't a large factor in the current warming. They've also looked at natural cycles, and found that we should be in the middle of a cooling period right now.

"An often-cited 1980 study by Imbrie and Imbrie determined that 'Ignoring anthropogenic and other possible sources of variation acting at frequencies higher than one cycle per 19,000 years, this model predicts that the long-term cooling trend which began some 6,000 years ago will continue for the next 23,000 years.'"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycle#Th...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/207...

So it's definitely not the Earth's natural cycles. They looked at volcanoes, and found that

a) volcanoes cause more global cooling than warming, because the particles they emit block sunlight

b) humans emit over 150 times more CO2 than volcanoes annually

http://volcano.und.edu/vwdocs/Gases/man.html

So it's certainly not due to volcanoes. Then they looked at human greenhouse gas emissions. We know how much atmospheric CO2 concentrations have increased over the past 50 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mauna_Loa_Carbo...

And we know from isotope ratios that this increase is due entirely to human emissions from burning fossil fuels. We know how much of a greenhouse effect these gases like carbon dioxide have, and the increase we've seen is enough to have caused almost all of the warming we've seen over the past 30 years (about 80-90%). You can see a model of the various factors over the past century here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_...

This is enough evidence to convince almost all climate scientists that humans are the primary cause of the current global warming.

Funny, as I thought that was the way that global warming opponents presented their case......see the great gloval warming swindle documentary

It's great, I've stumbled across this section, another classic yahoo answers battleground full of excrement

The atmosphere is getting warmer - a consensus beyond argument. Climate change is real

Caused by man, as certain as we can be in contrast with natural mechanisms that have led to past warming

The end

No. Global warming is supported by evidence.

People often write summary or synthesis papers such as you describe. But they are e written for the convenience of educated people--who can always check the cited claims against the source if need be--there are no "unsupported" claims.

People who criticize synthesis papers like that are only proving they are totally ignorant of how science--or scientific publications--works. What you describe, in other words, is not "bad science"--the person doing the project simply did not understand what he/she was reading.

Yep...you can support both sides of the argument with equal enthusiasm.I see some people are still confused over GW-vs-AGW.

Scientist should spend their time and our money studying/eliminating the more detrimental pollutants.

It is an example of tactics used by fascists.

In this case it's Algore's enviro-fascists.

Indoctrination of our youth is another example.