What do you think is causing global warming, and why?

Man made CO2 is causing the warming, along with any stray natural CO2 that's been released during the last 1-200 years. I think that the melting of the polar caps is slowing the rise in temperature somewhat. Deforestation is playing a larger role all the time, not just as regards CO2, but for the cooling effects forests have (cities create the opposite type of thermal air currents). That's hard to assess right now. There just aren't enough monitors.

As you and I have discussed before, I think when the glaciers and polar caps are gone, things will warm a lot faster. I expect that point to come a lot sooner than predicted. All of the changes with the ice we've been seeing have been coming ahead of schedule, and more so all the time. Remember the ice shelf that collapsed a couple of weeks ago? They had predicted it, but for decades from now, not weeks ago. The main reason I believe this is so many factors have been excluded from the reports that make the predictions, both because of politics and our own ignorance. I don't need to reiterate the politics. By ignorance, I mean things like nobody expected the ice caps would detach from their bedrock and start sliding into the ocean as they are. That gives you a lot faster melting than if they had melted in place. There are examples of that type thing every where you look.

I think even the dullest of the pro-petroleum people would admit if pressed that there is some point with the oceans where the addition of any additional pollution will kill the whole ecosystem. (well maybe half of the pro-petroleum people). We don't know how far we are from that point, but we go right on dumping, and more every day. We've now found farm chemicals like growth hormones, pesticides, and antibiotics in deep oceans fish. It's likely that there are no more uncontaminated areas. Thor Heyerdahl sounded alarm when in the 1980's he crossed the Atlantic in the RA and found small grape like objects all the way across. These turned out to be made of Algae and petroleum. That was 20 years ago. There are now huge "dead zones" in the oceans that grow every year, and we don't know why.

Plastics are one of the worst issues. Besides being made from petroleum, they pollute the environment in every possible way. They kill millions of every species sea creatures every year. They break down in salt water and accumulate in the food chain like DDT. When the oceans are dead life on land is in serious trouble, including us. How will that affect these timelines people smugly present, saying we are centuries or millenia away from even needing to think about AGW? A lot I suspect.

Lakes and inland seas are drying up all over the world. The people who have depended on them for thousands of years are at risk. Small wars and skirmishes over water are breaking out. Half the people on earth have no water supply of their own. Financial analysts predict water will be the next brokered commodity. If you look around, it's already happening. Interestingly, the biggest players are many of the people in Government. Just as with petroleum, they profit by the demise of the human race. The glaciers in the Himalayas are melting (fast) for the first time since humans evolved. They supply most of the water for Asia, including China. The programs the current Administration has promoted (hydrogen and ethanol) are carefully constructed to fail. They have also managed to kill many effective programs, such as the EV-1.

My argument is that the collapse of each important system, natural or technological, creates a larger requirement for burning fossil fuels, making things deteriorate faster. If we don't begin to do things differently, people who think a crisis is centuries away are going to get a big surprise, real soon.

Species go extinct at the rate of 3 per hour, 95% of them unknown to science. Human created "monoculture" threatens the viability of larger and larger regions. We are very close to fulfilling Phillip K. Dick's prediction, that we would create a world we are not adapted to live in.

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Angry liberals are causing it by all their hot air. I wonder what it will take for you to admit you were wrong. In 10 or 20 years it will be funny to see you try to talk yourself out off all you said here. By then you will be trying to make money from saying global warming is now causing global cooling and that if we don't punish the evil Americans then world will end. Lucky for us most people don't fall for it. I'm not sure why you are asking a question like this because I know you won't accept any facts that go against your "religion".

This is not an attempt to critique the entire article, but a couple thoughts on particular topics. I’m just kind of thinking out loud here.

Reference the paragraph:

“Might the current climate change be due to changes in the Earth's oribtal cycles? The answer is no. 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."

Are we to infer that since we are in a 23,000 year cooling trend, that the current warming is a sign that the cooling cycle is “breaking” and instead taking an upward swing (warming)?

I don’t think we can safely make that assumption at this point in time since there remains 17,000 years in the cycle. In other words, if you were to chart the entire 23,000 years, there is no doubt in my mind that there may be several century-long periods that deviate dramatically from the trend line; but these anomalous “blips” would smooth out and all but disappear over the full period. It is difficult to accept that temperature increase in a shorter time frame indicates that the cooling cycle is broken.

In the section on AGW, there is a link to a Realclimate article that tries to ascribe all CO2 increase to human activity by charting conversion of 14C to 12C. But one item jumped out at me in that article, which was that the 14C to 12C conversion is catalyzed by cosmic rays, which are not even mentioned in the article (I read the more scientific one, not the “light” versions). In order to make a complete analysis and draw a valid conclusion, he would need to have also tracked cosmic ray activity during the same period; as it is part of the equation. I’m not saying that this reverses his conclusion, but it seems the research is incomplete.

Anyway, that’s my 2 cents on the referenced article. Always happy to help :-)

But to answer your main question, I think it is a combination of many factors, with any anthropogenic enhancement to the greenhouse effect being only a very small part of the equation.

The biggest cause of global warming is the increase in volcanic activity which is a huge emitter of carbon dioxide and water vapor.

Man made contributions are mainly caused by the United States of America, China, India, and the EU. Between these four areas over 75% of all green house gases are created.

China has surpassed the United States in total emissions but not per person yet because of the size difference between the two. India is not too far behind the output of the United States and the EU has been increasing their output again after seeing a dip when they shutdown the old Soviet power plants and dirty manufacturing plants for cleaner ones.

Just like Y2K, global warming is a hoax being perpetrated by the media on an unsuspecting populous. Only a small segment of the earth’s overall data – about 130 years of the 4.2 billion year age of the earth – are being analyzed, in an effort to spin the information to match a gloom and doom prophecy. The earth’s atmospheric history is filled with large scale swings in temperature, which are self regulating throughout time.

China Growth & Global Warming

This is easy to answer. Global warming is caused by too many people on the earth, period!

If people didn't think they had to multiply like rabbits, if certain religions didn't forbid birth control and stopped encouraging families to be the size of tribes, we wouldn't have the problem.

You haven't seen any global warming yet to speak of. Right now China only has about 22 million cars on the road. Just wait until all of the economic growth that China is undergoing right now matures and the remaining 80% of the people who can drive cars over there go out and buy one once they have the money to. China's population is now approx. 1.4 billion (1/5 of the world's population) vs. our 300 million. From The Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation: "If China had the same number of cars per person as we have in the United States, there would be more than 800 million cars on the road there."

The sad part of it all is that we are encouraging and supporting their economic growth (to our detriment) by purchasing the made-in-China dog feces quality products that populate the store shelves in all of the x-Mart stores in the USA. It is not entirely the Chinese who are to blame though. Any country who has the technical ability to put a satellite in orbit (China) is obviously capable of building a quality product - it is just that American corporations specify that what they want to put in the x-Marts is a product that is cheap, to satisfy the American consumer's demand. The only reason that this low quality crap IS there is because Americans still don't realize that there is no such thing as a free lunch, you get what you pay for, etc., etc. This is also coupled with our milk-toast attitude towards doing anything about it. The Chinese ship us toxic waste in the form of leaded toys to poison our children, melamine spiked glutin in pet food to kill our pets, and they pirate our CDs and DVDs, injuring some of our own industries. Oh yeah, I forgot, once in a while on TV we see some Chinese police crushing a pile of CDs on a street corner, like this is really making a dent on what they illegally produce! The list of grievances goes on and on. What to we do - NOTHING! Were any punitive damages placed on the Chinese companies who did any of these things? The answer is obvious. What needs to be done is for this country to stand up and say, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore." You want a fix - put an embargo on Chinese products - period. To send this message, stop their ships at the ports and turn them around. OK, we all know that that is not going to happen, because the x-Mart driven economy and metality of this country would not allow it. Sometimes we don't want to hear the answer or the solution when it stares us in the face . . .

my thoughts on global warming... there is no such thing now bio diesel has increased green house gasses it's all hoax. the earth has been changing for billions of years and will continue untill this planet dies out think about it there where no power plants when mamoths romed the earth and all that ice melted away. before them everything was covered with trees and forest unitll the heat went up causeing a drought and leaving dino's and it's mamals without any greens to eat before the "astroid" of corse but like i am saying us as animals we need to adapt to the earths way of life not the other way around .

Sun's Direct Role in Global Warming May Be Underestimated, Duke Physicists Report

"At least 10 to 30 percent of global warming measured during the past two decades may be due to increased solar output rather than factors such as increased heat-absorbing carbon dioxide gas released by various human activities, two Duke University physicists report."

http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html

Fallacies about Global Warming

"...This paper explains the eight most common fallacies that underpin public discussion of the hypothesis that dangerous global warming is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions...."

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/f...

Video:

The Truth About Climate Change: http://tinyurl.com/3xeokp

Global warming is but a component, in a group of destructive forces at work such as ;deforestation,desertification,soil and water contamination ,irresponsible or wasteful utilization of bio resources , air pollution,Non sustainable Agriculture,over pumping carbon aquifers

all concepts which are definitely not part of the Natural Processes of the Natural world

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AiaA9...

WHICH WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR,

The most prolific growth on this planet is part of the day in the mist and most of the time under clouds ,and the least growth is always directly in the sun .

To exchange the one for the other means changing local climates

We are exchanging Nature with Tar , concrete and open spaced mono cultures.

In 300 years half of the planets forests have gone ,and in the last 50 years half of the wet lands ,and rain forests

These Areas absorb heat during the day and release heat at night ,

Cause cloud formation(shade).humidifying the air on the surface as well as releasing excess water at the roots that keep rivers flowing ,which in turn brings more water into the Environment .

As well as contributing to absorbing carbon emissions as do the leaves of the trees together with the oceans .

All in all many factors which directly affect the local Environment .

The loss of the above resulting in rivers drying up ,less rain ,desertification,loss of habitat for many species and so on.

dryer and hotter surface environments which can manifest in different weather patterns such as tornadoes or bush fires

I may be stupid or Naive but somehow i believe that lots of these local environmental changes, can add up to affect global weather, If there are enough of them (and there are)

And then on top of that comes the story of the effects of pollutants released into Nature and especially the Air ,by MAN ,http://earthissues.multiply.com/photos/album/5/EMI...

And then there is of course Global Warming lets say the Natural one

(Bob or Trevor can talk better about that )

A cocktail of events and a lot of the ingredients have MAN written all over them

So it is safe to assume that we should look at ourselves ,just a teeny bit ,for possible improvements ,and rectifying Eco errors that are with in our powers.

What is a safer bet

to be or not to be