I'm too lazy to go back and look up all the evidence again so I won't comment directly, but I want to know if you participated in collegiate debate during the 04-05 school year, Xavius.

I'm surprised that nobody's mentioned that we're in the end phases of a very minor ice age, so there's also the natural progression of things that's causing a slight increase in global temperatures.

As for why nobody cares: that's because it happens reeeeaaaallllllyyyy slloooooowwww. And policy makers don't give a TRA about what their successors (sp?) will have to deal with.

I think currently nobody cares, because of all the hype and prophecies of doom in the 1970s which never came about.

It isn't all that simple to just get up and change how evertying from plastic things on the end of your shoelaces, to giving people heating so they don't freeze during the winter works.

I did not, but a semi-similar topic came up in the 01-02 high school debate season. Something about the right of third-world nations to develop taking priority over environmental concerns.

You know, I think I have that brief in that box right over there...

Global warming is accually a natural effect (and there are serious climate changes, especially in europe). Polution probably speed up the process, but it's a natural circle. Global warming --> icecap melting --> change in weather --> other gases entering ozon --> ice age --> ozon layer regenerates --> normal transition period rince and repeat. Or atleast that is one of the theories.

It's also proven that trees enlarge the hole in the ozon layer.

I don't suppose you have a source for that, do you? It's an interesting idea, but I'd like to see it in original form so I can play a game of "spot the baseless assertion."

it was on the discovery channel once, I should ask my sister about it once since she is a bio-engineer

I could have used some of that global warming on my Memorial Day camping trip, it was SNOWING. Enviros just need to take some prozac, relax, and leave us the hell alone. Next thing you know, they'll want us to stop breathing because we put CO2 in the air with every breath.

accually the reason why there should be less car and industrial air polution is that it's unhealthy and causes allergies, cancers and asthma.

The majority of scientists world wide say that global warming is a mostly direct result of human actions, its not just that its a natural process being speeded up, thats like saying cutting down miles and miles of rain forest is just speeding up the natural circle because the trees and the forest would die eventually.



Just because penguines are fun, but really humans are producing more gasses which amplifys the green house effect causing the world to heat up and the ice caps to melt unnaturally. And yes the penguines arnt completly accurate but I thought they were fun

How can Icecaps melting overflow the land?

Take a cup of Ice. Fill it up with water untill the brim is full, let the cup sit and all the ice melt, see if any water spills over the edge...

Er, the kyoto protocol limits emissions pretty much everywhere. The US is the only significantly pollutant country that hasn't signed it. And yes, it's a commonly known chemical fact that greenhouse gasses have an effect in the earth's temperature, but how much of the temperature rises is a natural change and how much is man-made isn't easy to determine nor certain; it can very well be that the effect of greenhouse gasses generated by human activities is small, or even statistically irrelevant. However, very minor variances in temperature can cause ecological damage; this is very well known. It can also change the speed of maritime currents (Causing horrible devastation just like in The Day After Tomorrow! Yeah right.) and several other minor effects that, when taken together, are bad.

Oh, and higher temperatures in large cities are a documented fact, but they don't have much to do with global warming; rather, they relate to both the different termic properties of concrete/plastic/asphalt/glass as opposed to bare earth, and to the very visible (Yes, it's visible. You can see a yellowed, light grey band in the horizon here depending on atmospheric conditions.) smog that hangs over some large cities. This, however, has been going on since the Industrial Revolution and isn't nearly as bad now as it used to be.

As for the whole ice caps melting thing, you see, the ice caps are massive and several metres above sea-level. (Everyone has seen pictures of huge ice cliffs towering over the sea.). And then there's the bit that's above the South Pole, which is an actual continent, not a section of permanently frozen sea. That is what worries environmentalists. There is danger there, even if it's less pronounced than it seems to some people and is definitely not catastrophic.

Again, go back to the ice in a cup example. You can have the ice be inches over the rim of the cup, and still no spilling.

Antartica becoming dry land, that is interesting, but might even be helpfull for the earth to have new forms of life and new species of plants evolve.

Yeah, but lots of people drown in the process. But yes, a substantial amount of ice is above the surface. The water level in a glass with ice does rise when it melts, but very little; not much of the ice cube is above the surface. However, you look at the north pole and those ten- twenty- or thirty-metre high cliffs of ice, and at the south pole, which has a thick coating of ice that is well above sea-level. I'm not saying it's going to happen beyond the rise of around one metre, at least not by human intervention, but it is true that they can cause significant rises in the sea level if they melt, due to, say, a significant temperature change (Natural or otherwise).

According to Mr. Wizard in about 1986, the water does not rise at all, because even though the ice cube is phisycally above the water, the mass is still displacing it. It is less dense, but the same amount of mass is still there.

but.....Thats just the tip of the iceburg.

That would take a good few million years, though, and that's a bit too long-term for even the zaniest outlook.

accually antartica is a land mass covered by ice, therefore the melting of that ice could cause a rise in sea level.

these being the same scientists that said planting trees would fix the problem? And your anology with the rainforest is not even remotely appliable, read a bit about pre-human global warming, and the solar effect theories. Also forest normally don't die unless there is an outside force.

Also if you want to attribute to human factor use the term 'anthropogenic climate change' or 'anthropogenic greenhouse effect' since climate change and greenhouse effect are natural, vital things to earth.

No. No. The link to the Archimedes Principle is on page 1. No matter how much ice you melt, the water level will not go up if it is floating in the water. Antartica is an island chain, so it will raise some once you get into the center. Not much.

I'm pretty convinced that global warming is happening. I used to believe it was caused by humans, but I'm starting to have doubts that humans are the cause, or at least the root cause. Here are a few things that make it a tricky subject.

* I recently saw a headline stating the Earth is the warmest it's been in X hundreds of years. I forget the exact total number of centuries, but it was less than 500 years. The article was trying to make the case in favour of the human cause for global warming by making the case for its stated headlines, but after reading it I realized the real meaning of the headline is that the Earth was hotter when Christopher Columbus landed in the New World than it is today. So is the Earth really abnormally warm?

* Earlier in the century there were graphs showing the Earth was cooling. (Someone mentioned a Time magazine article on it; I've seen that.) The theory was that the pollution was making the atmosphere darker, and thus less sunlight was able to reach the Earth's surface and warm it. The cooling was statistically significant, measured I believe since the start of the 20th century. It seems to me like we'd need more than 20-30 years to decide if something this massive has changed its trend with a proper level of statistical significance, and even then it only proves the occurance but says nothing of its cause.

* Search the net for the "Little Ice Age". This was a period of abnormal cooling following the Medieval period. Some have attributed the brutal winter that George Washingon suffered at Valley Forge as a result of the period of global cooling. Since then, the Earth has warmed considerably without greenhouse gases.

* The real Ice Age was the result of massive global cooling. And the reason why much of Europe, all of Canada, and and the northern United States are not covered with a mile of ice glaciers anymore is due to a global warming that destroyed most of the world's glaciers and sent tracts of dry land (like the Bering Straight) under water long before mankind had discovered fire. Thus global warming on a massive scale has happened without human intervention.

* Along the lines of the Little Ice Age, since the period of Gallileo, scientists have known about sun spots and have measured sun spot activity. There has been a correlation between the world's tempurature and sun spot activity. For example, sun spots diminished during the Little Ice Age. Some scientists have proposed that the Sun is currently burning hotter than it has in a thousand years. How much impact does the Sun have on Earth's climate? Probably a lot. Enough to cause global warming? I don't know because the politicians fail to address this issue in their books, speeches, and movies.

So what worries me is that politicians and the media are the ones speaking most loudly on this and they are carting out their favourite scientists, provided the scientists agree with what they want them to say; scientists who disagree are ignored. Anyone outside the scientific community who disagrees is accused by those politicians of being anti-science. It is ironically the same sort behaviour exhibited by the politicians that were advocating intelligent design. When politicians and news anchors are the ones trying to explain science to me, my "ulterior motive radar" starts to bleep and I grow suspect. This also could encourage shoddy science since it might cause scientists to stop researching once the legislature has acted rather than trying to formulate a full model that encompasses all of the above questions that need to be addressed before we can say that we have a complete model of global warming.