Global Warming (2010)

[bacon]

Global Warming

I posted this about a year ago, but I want to see how people change their viewpoints and whatnot. And this is always a decent discussion.

Global Warming is the increase of the average temperature on Earth. Many scientists agree and disagree with the theory that global warming is taking place. Many enviromentalists are taking charge and spreading the word about global warming. Many bussinesses also try to go green, to increase their sales and attract more costomers. What do you think?

• Do you think global warming is real?
• Do you think that the media and businesses are hyping global warming too much?
• Do you think that we, as a society, should switch to greener energy?
• Do you think the idea of global warming is being pushed onto society?
• Do you think global warming is human caused or is it just nature?

This is a serious thread. Im not asking for perfection, but I am asking for semi-decent posts. I want to know why. One word answers will not be acceptable and you will be punished accordingly if this does occur.

 

[Ellie]

I do not understand, know all the details, or to be honest have any impact on global warming. I know the basics of why it might happen, I know how that works, but I do not know the current science, the current theories, or where anybody is on the matter. I don't even know what current public opinion is or anything.

Therefore I do not get into debates and such about it.

However, what I do feel deeply about is the environment. Walking past petrol cars is just shitty, even for people who aren't asthematic. Walking down a street full of rubbish sucks, and seeing someone so utterly selfish and non-caring as to drop litter or leave it on the bus is just sickening. I was in the 900 from Brum to Cov the other day and a bloke pissed in a bottle amongst his friends and left it on the bus without the lid on. I got off then but uh yeah, wonder what happened to that -

And worse than that is flytipping which frankly should carry the death penalty, I don't care if that is well harsh. It is the only way to solve these ignorant, selfish and anti social people. The sort of person who dumps a 10ft pile of industrial rubbish in the middle of a Wombourne residential street deserves to be removed from society and it is obvious they will never change.

In short what I am saying is this:

- Global warming is confusing and I do not understand it, however
- The things scientists say we should do to solve global warming and solve a lot of our other environmental issues

So,

- We should do what the scientists say in the vague hope it might solve global warming, but with a side goal of just plain improving our environment and quality of life

 

[bacon]

Ive never heard of flytipping what is it exactly?

Yeah that is sort of how I am. I believe that global warming is natural, however we are increasing the rate and pace that it does occur. Some people are just lazy. I dont live in an extreme urban area like you do como, I sort of like vast amounts of dirt and sand but still, the roads are rather disgusting. I mean, there are literally piles upon piles of garbage on roads with no businesses or even developments on them. The only way that garbage probably got there is people throwing it out their car windows. I mean, there is plastic around trees, its just a gross mess. Is it that hard to throw garbage away?

Sometimes in the way early morning I find myself in more urban areas. I see pollution and smoke rise from literally half the buildings. Its gross, white smoke. Arizona, since it isnt humid and usually there arent winds or anything, can get really air polluted. I remember onetime we had a layer of yellow pollution surround Phoenix. You could legitly see it and without any rain or any storm systems, it staid there for quite a long while. I think there should be more regulations on pollution and whatnot. Its obviously not good for people's health.

 

[Ellie]

Flytipping is when you fill up the boot of your car with rubbish and drive round and dump it in a quiet spot. Well it's just generally dumping rubbish, like a matress or something the bin men won't take, etc. But in worst cases it is companies such as builders doing house renovations who don't want to pay to dump a whole van of rubble and waste so they just fnd a quiet location (often a residential estate or a place of natural beauty) and dump it.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

There's no doubt that global warming is real and happening. Anybody that tries to refute it is an idiot that gets their information from biased right-wing sources and Fox News.

Ok maybe that's a little extremist but there is pretty much no reputable climatologist out there denying global warming is real and it's happening right now. The term 'global warming' itself tends to cause a lot of confusion unfortunately with people completely misinterpreting what it really means.

Global warming means the average temperature of the planet is rising. It does not mean that every single place on the planet is going to get warmer. A better term is 'climate change', because as the earth gets warmer, the weather will change depending on where you are. It's not just a uniform temperature gain. Obviously in places like the poles there will be a dramatic increase in heat - we're seeing just how bad it is already.

However, you'll see a lot of people take last year's winter in the US as an argument against global warming. (political cartoons are especially bad for this!) Yeah, nobody's denying the midatlantic (Washington especially) got hammered with one of their coldest and snowiest winters ever. But the fact is that just because a small part of the planet is cooler than usual does not refutre global warming. As the average temperature increases, some places will get warmer, some will get colder; some will get drier, some will get wetter. Seeing so much blatant misinformation and lies being spread as fact induces me with so much RAW RAGE you have no idea!!

But our addiction to oil is so strong that very little is likely to change in the next few years. Places like Pakistan and Afghanistan, already some of the most wartorn and difficult places to live on the planet, will keep getting drier (or wetter, like with Pakistan's flooding) and finding sources of potable water will get harder and harder. Global warming, ultimately, is not just an envionmental - it's an important issue of security as well. It's something that always gets brushed away by idiots who don't think it's a big deal, when it's going to change the life of every living thing on the planet forever.

Sensationalizing global warming with anecdotal evidence and appealing to our emotions isn't the way to go, either, but unfortunately the media has become so saturated with fear tactics that people have begun tuning out anything relating to global warming and dismissing the changes our planet is experience as part of a 'natural warming cycle'. Basically, we're screwed.

 

[EnderX]

Yes, Global Warming is probably happening - on average at least. However, that's not what the real furor is about.

The problem most of us 'biased right-wing' individuals have is that there are two phenomena being conflated here for political purposes.

1) Global Warming - the idea that the earth is getting warmer.
2) Anthropogenic Global Warming (APGW) - the idea that the earth is getting warmer when it shouldn't be, and that it's all humankind's fault.

The evidence indicates that Global Warming is part of a natural cyclical pattern - consider that there have historically been bursts of warming and cooling well before 'teh ebil consumeratives' began...ever heard of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age?

The problem is that while Global Warming is a real scientific issue, APGW is very much a political and politicized issue. Ergo, it's the political pronouncements that get accepted as though they were the scientific statements - generally by the 'Old Media' commonly known (collectively) as the News, but also by some scientists. Forget what you might want to believe; scientists are just as susceptible to political considerations as any other human being. (Especially in the issue of funding.)

It's worth noting that some sources indicate the projected 'human-caused' rise is less than the margin of error on the recorded statistics. If this is the case, then how would you be able to tell if it actually happened or not?

And as a final note, mostly directed toward mouse, most of the 'biased right-wing' individuals I know are in fact conservationists/stewards. We do believe that we have an obligation (to ourselves, to our children and their descendants, and in the case of the religious, to our God) to care for the planet. We simply don't believe that the measures brought up as 'prevent Global Warming' (by which the people making these arguments generally mean APGW) have any real validity. The following comparison might help explain this strange divide a bit: Who is more likely to be concerned with keeping animal populations high/stable - the guy who never sets foot outside his car when wandering outside the city, or the hunter?

 

[kyonides]

I think I read somewhere that CO2 and high mountains actually lower the world's temperature...

 

[Ellie]

Unfortunately "I think I read somewhere" is where all the great scientific rumours start.

 

[Anski]

I think I read somewhere that the world spins. Confirmed y/n?


Hello lets read the rules above before posting I dont mind a short, decent point that adds to the arguments but mr. joke man isnt cute.

 

[JoshieBoy]

Does the world spin, or does everything else? O_o

Global warming is happening, the question is why? Is what we have been told really true, or is it a marketing opportunity? There is also evidence that this has happened over the last 15000 years. So what is truly at fault here? We blame ourselves, but the earth has survived volcanic eruptions and dinosaur flatulence that output more carbon and harmful gases than we could ever hope to. Are we really the straw that is breaking the earths back?

 

[dadevvtsvre]

I think I read somewhere that CO2 and high mountains actually lower the world's temperature...

Except that it doesn't. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which means it contributes to the absorption of infrared light in the atmosphere. The more CO2 we have in our atmosphere, the warmer the planet gets, because more energy from the sun is absorbed. And what do high mountains have to do with anything @_@

Carbon dioxide levels have been at their highest in, by some counts, millions of years. There's the idea that CO2 has been lagging behind temperature - e.g., temperature increases first, and then CO2 increases - but this is only partially true. When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2 but by changes in the Earth's orbit. The warming causes the oceans to give up CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet. So CO2 causes warming AND rising temperature causes CO2 rise.

Some have theorized that more CO2 in the atmosphere is actually better for us. They say that more CO2 is better for plants, which produce oxygen - therefore, more CO2 actually creates more oxygen. There's a major problem with this theory though. Plants give off water vapour in a process called transpiration to cool off, like humans do with sweat. This process in turn cools the air around it. But when CO2 levels are really high, plants don't give off as much water vapour because their leaf pores shrink. When it comes to plants, it's not as simple as "more carbon dioxide = more oxygen" - there are a lot more factors at play.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

Does the world spin, or does everything else? O_o

Global warming is happening, the question is why? Is what we have been told really true, or is it a marketing opportunity? There is also evidence that this has happened over the last 15000 years. So what is truly at fault here? We blame ourselves, but the earth has survived volcanic eruptions and dinosaur flatulence that output more carbon and harmful gases than we could ever hope to. Are we really the straw that is breaking the earths back?

Probably!

I'm not going to deny that there's a lot of businesses out there that have downplayed global warming by using the opportunity to sell their products. There are tons of companies out there that sell themselves as "green" and the market is getting waaay too saturated.

But the fact is that volcanic eruptions and natural causes produce very little CO2 compared to the millions of tons we shoot into the atmosphere. And the earth was a very different place 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs were still kicking around - the air was so different it's unlikely us humans could have survived there. The difference between the warming cycles of the past and the warming of today is the speed in which it's occuring. Whereas millions of years ago, temperatures rose fractions of degrees over periods of thousands of years, it's happening now in mere decades. It's never gotten this warm, this fast before.

 

[JoshieBoy]

I agree. (the dinosaur flatulence was meant to be comic relief from a depressive subject) I wish there was a more optimistic standpoint, but it is really blunt subject. I know it sounds funny, but if there is a way to harm the ozone shouldn't there be a way to repair it? I have seen similar things in chemistry, so I do not think it is impossible, but there has to be something we can do.

 

[dadevvtsvre]

Yes, Global Warming is probably happening - on average at least. However, that's not what the real furor is about.

The problem most of us 'biased right-wing' individuals have is that there are two phenomena being conflated here for political purposes.

1) Global Warming - the idea that the earth is getting warmer.
2) Anthropogenic Global Warming (APGW) - the idea that the earth is getting warmer when it shouldn't be, and that it's all humankind's fault.

The evidence indicates that Global Warming is part of a natural cyclical pattern - consider that there have historically been bursts of warming and cooling well before 'teh ebil consumeratives' began...ever heard of the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age?

The problem is that while Global Warming is a real scientific issue, APGW is very much a political and politicized issue. Ergo, it's the political pronouncements that get accepted as though they were the scientific statements - generally by the 'Old Media' commonly known (collectively) as the News, but also by some scientists. Forget what you might want to believe; scientists are just as susceptible to political considerations as any other human being. (Especially in the issue of funding.)

It's worth noting that some sources indicate the projected 'human-caused' rise is less than the margin of error on the recorded statistics. If this is the case, then how would you be able to tell if it actually happened or not?

And as a final note, mostly directed toward mouse, most of the 'biased right-wing' individuals I know are in fact conservationists/stewards. We do believe that we have an obligation (to ourselves, to our children and their descendants, and in the case of the religious, to our God) to care for the planet. We simply don't believe that the measures brought up as 'prevent Global Warming' (by which the people making these arguments generally mean APGW) have any real validity. The following comparison might help explain this strange divide a bit: Who is more likely to be concerned with keeping animal populations high/stable - the guy who never sets foot outside his car when wandering outside the city, or the hunter?

It's getting late and I'm too lazy to type up a proper respone but you should check out this site, it might have some info you'd find interesting.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/global- ... ediate.htm

Skeptical Science is like my Bible :3

 

[Venetia]

kyonides was (probably) referring to the hypothetical "icehouse effect"

not as in the effect of hazy drunkenness brought on by a cheap, shitty beer

the "icehouse effect" is a term for the large-scale absoption of co2 into volcanic rock.
it is theorized one of the instigators for the ice age is that, as the appalachian and himalayan mountains rose during the ordovician period, they gradually sloughed off their layers of volanic rock.

this silicate rock material formed deposits of sediment along sea floors. this material then absorbed vast, vast amounts of co2, and the temperature dropped significantly in a [relatively] short amount of time. this caused a nearly worldwide deep freeze.

note: the volcanic sediment i speak of is very high in strontium, which breaks down very easily with oxygen bonds like water (oxidization)

in a much slower fashion, the co2 has been building back up in the atmosphere. it is hugely unlikely that we will see any drastic re-introduction of volcanic sediment, so the warming trend will continue. without the sediment the warming trend will continue forever--even if severely slowed by sudden conservation and co2 economy--forever, unless a major geological change were to occur.