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Trevor
Lv 7
Trevor asked in EnvironmentGlobal Warming · 10 years ago

Any news about the natural cycles that are causing global warming?

For some time now it’s been a regular argument that natural cycles are the cause of much of, and in some cases all of, the warming that’s been observed in recent decades.

On several occasions an explanation of these cycles has been requested and I’m not aware that one has been forthcoming – not just on Answers but in the wider world as well.

Given that this is a popular argument from some climate change skeptics, and is one that has been around for a good number of years, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect an explanation to be forthcoming. Therefore, I would request any skeptic to explain which natural cycles are responsible for the recent warming.

I would be most interested in knowing which cycle(s) is responsible, the effects it has upon Earth’s climate and the time-scales involved.

8 Answers

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  • 10 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Does Roy Spencer's cloud theory help? It's all from changes in clouds ... and those changes are "random". He's been promoting that concept since the 1990s but hasn't seemed to have convinced anyone of his "random" theory yet.

    You're question is a very good one, to which the answer is usually "it is natural because it's always been natural". A corollary is "How has climate changed in the past if CO2 has not been a primary driver in the past?" The point of these questions is to help people realize that they come only from people who know very little about climate changes, and hopefully people can start to understand why how much climate denying is based on normal misunderstanding of climate changes.

  • Maxx
    Lv 7
    10 years ago

    Well, I've already posted on the Sun's natural cycle more than a dozen times, so if you are not keen to that one by now then there is no point in posting it again.

    So how about this natural occurrence. A sudden upshot in atmospheric methane that has appeared globally and is NOT man-made. This is according to research done by Ronald Prinn, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science at MIT.

    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/methane-tt1029....

    The drift of the article is that it is far from certain that human activity is to blame for any kind of climate change.

  • Anonymous
    4 years ago

    worldwide warming is one-a million/2 of the climatic cycle of warming and cooling. The earth's recommend temperature cycles around the freezing ingredient of water. this may be a thoroughly organic phenomenon which has been going on in view that there has been water on the planet. this is pushed via the solar. Our planet is presently rising from a 'mini ice age', so is transforming into warmer and might return to the ingredient at which Greenland is returned usable as farmland (as this is been in recorded background). because of the fact the polar ice caps shrink, the quantity of sparkling water mixing with oceanic water will sluggish and doubtless supply up the thermohaline cycle (the oceanic warmth 'conveyor' which, between different issues, keeps the U.S. east coast heat). whilst this cycle slows/stops, the planet will cool returned and start to go into yet another ice age. this is been going on for tens of millions of years. .

  • 10 years ago

    This question seems to be leading towards a logical fallacy, actual several to be more precise.

    If you really are a scientist you'll be aware that an absence of evidence is the argumentum ad ignorantiam logical fallacy. If I cannot positively identify one or more natural cycles which can be responsible for recent warming, that is not evidence for the CO2 theory.

    Then there is the burden of proof which is central to the scientific method. It is not the job of skeptics to find the cause of recent warming, it the job of promoters of the CO2 theory of warming to provide evidence for it. Simply saying "prove me wrong" is the logically fallacy here.

    This issue has many other logical fallacies as follows, but not limited to:

    Appeal to Authority: "Every science academy and 97% of climate scientists believe....."

    Argument from repetition: If you say enough times, people might actually start believing it.

    Argumentum Verbosium: This subject is so complex that you should just accept what climate scientists are telling us.

    Correlation does not imply causation: Correlation between two variables (ie. CO2 levels and global temperature) does not imply that one causes the other. Not only that, it is assumed that CO2 is the cause and not the other way around of which there is some evidence.

    Equivocation: Use of the word "most" by the IPCC is an example.

    Fallacy of the single cause: CO2 has been the focus of climate research since the IPCC was conceived. Even your question implies that CO2 must be THE cause.

    Moving the goalposts: In climate science, somebody could write a book on this one.

    Cherry picking: You can accuse skeptics of doing this but you can't deny warmers of not doing it as well.

    Misleading vividness: This is where alarmism comes into play to aid the "cause".

    Ad hominem: Anyone who does this risks losing credibility. It happens all the time in this issue.

    Association fallacy: "Big oil is funding that skeptic."

    I could go on for hours.

  • 10 years ago

    Yes. solar activity suddenly quietening down in 2009 rather than picking up. but then the previous years should have been a period of cooling.

    but its awfully quiet

  • 10 years ago

    I think you are old enough to remember a time, Trevor, when climate science was a fringe activity. If not, then read Weart or, for example, Fleming's biography of Callendar. There is a good accounting in such books regarding the many credible theories about natural causation that were gradually ruled out as being more significant than AGW in 20th century global climate change. Indeed the historical origins of climate science have more to do with the "riddle of the ice ages" than with anything the Exxon-Mobil dupes here have ever heard of.

    This history is important, because it helps one to bear in mind that human-caused climate change is actually a complicated and COUNTERINTUITIVE idea. Natural cycles ARE intuitive, and that goes a long way to explaining why the scientific consensus favored them until circa the 1970s.

    WIthout pretending to know the details, it seems to me that the last two great families of "natural" theories to fall before the onslaught of research, circa the 1990s, had to do with clouds and solar activity somehow offsetting or upstaging the human-caused greenhouse effect. Nothing is ever quite 100.0% settled in science, and I suppose that if there are any more big surprises to come involving somehow as yet insufficiently recognized "natural cycles," that those two areas would still be among the possible loci.

    P.S. Ottowa Mike already HAS "gone on for hours" dodging questions, throwing up smokescreens of irrelevancy, and failing to offer any scientific evidence in support of his psychologically-based denial of reality. His non-answer here is just another in his long series of non-skeptical anti-science posts on Yahoo Answers. Maybe he knows so much about logical fallacies because of all the red ink written about them on his below-passing grade school essays, or perhaps he just picked up them up along the way in his endless internet cut-and-paste quest for the holy grail to use against the evil environmentalists he imagines surrounding him. How anyone, especially a knowledgeable scientist such as you, Trevor, can call this sort of behavior being a "skeptic" boggles the mind.

  • ?
    Lv 6
    10 years ago
  • 10 years ago

    What warming?

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