Global Warming

Throughout the world the issue of global warming has become an increasingly important issue. Global warming has been an issue that has been heatedly debated for many years. Scientists all over the world have been debating weather global warming actually exists. If it exists some scientists believe it is natural. While others believe it is caused by humans.

Global warming is defined as an average increase in temperature in the atmosphere near the earths surface and in the troposphere. Which can contribute to changes in global climate patterns. In relativity the thickness of a coat of varnish on a globe is the thickness of the atmosphere compared to the world it self. Thin enough that we are capable enough to change its composition.

Over the past two hundred years the burning of fossil fuels such as, coal and oil, and deforestation have caused the concentrations of green house gases to increase. Which in turn causes the atmosphere to thicken. This prevents heat from escaping the earth for example like panels in a green house. The suns radiation comes to earth in the form of light waves. Most of this is absorbed by the earth and heats it. The earth sends some of this energy back to space in the form of infrared waves. Again some of this is trapped by the earth. This is important because this keeps the temperature on the earth livable.

This can also be a bad thing because of the green house gases that thicken the atmosphere. More and more of the suns heat gets trapped and cause the earths temperature to rise. Over the last century the average temperature has climbed one degree Fahrenheit, about sixty percent of a degree Celsius. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted the global temperature will rise an additional 3 to 10 degrees by the end of the century. So there should little doubt that the earth is warming.

The 1990's was the hottest decade since the mid 1800's when record keeping began. The hottest years were 1997-1998and 2001-2003. The rising temperatures have had a major impact on the artic ice. This ice serves as a air conditioner for the earth.
Since 1978 the artic sea ice are has shrunken 9%.

Since 1970 nuclear submarines have kept track of the thickness of the arctic ice shelf. It has diminished 40% in forty years. Scientists predict in the next fifty to seventy years it will have completely melted. These ice caps are important because 90% of the suns rays are reflected back to space, but if the suns rays hit the open ocean 90% of the suns energy is absorbed thus raising the earths surface temperature.

This continuous melting of glaciers and ice caps are a real big problem. Especially in the Himalayas, 40% of all the people in the world get there drinking water from rivers and streams fed from this glaciers seasonal melt. Within the next fifty years these people are going to have an extreme shortage of water. In 2002 the worlds largest ice shelf cracked in half(Ward Hunt ice shelf). Starting January 31, 2002 scientists began looking at the Larsen B ice shelf. Within thirty five days of studying it, it had completely broken off. Scientists assumed pools of water on the ice shelf would refreeze but instead burrowed deep into it creating mulins. Which caused the ice to break up. Not only did the sea based ice break up but the land based ice to. All because the sea based ice held it back. Since 1999 several ice shelves the size of Rhode Island have broke up and melted. Due to this many pacific nations had to be evacuated to New Zealand because of excessive flooding.

If this continues the earth sea level will continue to rise. If a shelf the size of Greenland or Greenland itself broke up the earths sea level will rise twenty feet and submerge many low lying countries causing millions of deaths.

Scientists that study ice cores can tell the carbon dioxide levels each year and how hot it was. Since congress passed the clean air act there is visible change in the ice cores. The carbon dioxide levels have never gone over 300 parts per million until this last decade. They will continue to rise extremely. Which will cause an increase in the earths temperature.

This is very bad because the earth redistributes heat through ocean and wind currents. The earths currents are all connected in one giant conveyer. The one part of the current that affects this part of our world is the north Atlantic current. The currents are formed by cold dense salt water that cause the hot water to sink. The melting of ice causes this cold water to dilute and slows the current. If the north Atlantic current was to stop the whole North American continent and Europe would go back into another ice age. Since the earths currents are all connected a 5 degree increase in the average annual temperature would cause a 1 degree increase at the equator but a 12 or more degree increase at the poles.

Scientists believe that the earths weather patterns are closely related to global warming. They believe the warmer the ocean gets the stronger the storms. In this past decade alone many records for weather have been set. In the western part of the United States 200 cities have set all time records for hottest days and consecutive days of 100 degrees or more. In the mid west we set a all time record for tornadoes in 2004 for an amazing 1717. The summer of 2005 we set records for the strongest hurricanes. One year before that the first ever hurricane hit the south Atlantic.

All around the world there have been severe storms. Japan set records for the most amount of typhoons, there was 10 of them the previous record was 7. August 23 2005 severe mudslides hit Austria and Switzerland. There has been extreme flooding in Asia. In Mumbar India 37 inches of rain fell in twenty for hours. The death toll reached 1000.
Global warming increases precipitation and relocates throughout the world.

Global warming sucks moisture from water sources and the soil. Darfur and Niger have experienced this first hand. Lake Chad used to be one of the biggest majestic lakes in the world now reduced to almost nothing. In 2003 a heat wave in Europe claimed 30000. While that same year the temperature in India rose to 122 degrees.

While there is much evidence to support global warming there are many people who think it is natural and it is not caused by humans. Even if it is what the global warming supporters expect from us is ridiculous. Naturally there has always been periods of warming and cooling. Scientists tell us that the green house effect is not fact but fiction. Global warming supporters say the climate has changed but actually the technology and the way we view the weather has changed.

Climate change refers to any change in climate such as temperature, precipitation or wind. Lasting for an extended period of time. So how can people decipher this short period of record keeping as fact. To fully understand the climate we need a long term record database. We also need the technology to understand this fully.

Global warming supporters expect us to go backwards instead of continuing forward with our technology. They expect us to stop using fossil fuels. This is almost impossible because it makes up about 90% of our energy. If we were to stop using fossil fuels we would go into an economic apocalypse.

They expect us to start living "Green". They want us to spend money on expensive energy saving supplies. Even though the cost of living is already high. We cant go back to what we came from after we made all these sacrifices to improve or technology.

According to a new study on global warming, climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia found that the climate change models based on human influence do not match observed warming.

That is contrary to the views held by former Vice President Al Gore, who accepted the Nobel Prize on Monday along with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and who thinks that climate change is largely caused by human action.

Gore wants nations to tax carbon dioxide emissions and not build any new coal plants, among other steps. "It is time to make peace with the planet," Gore said in his Nobel speech, as reported by the Associated Press. "We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war."

The new report, which challenges the claims of Gore and the IPCC, was published in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society.

The report was written by David Douglass at the University of Rochester, John Christy at the University of Alabama, and Benjamin Pearson and S. Fred Singer at the University of Virginia.

"Our findings basically are that fingerprints - that is to say the pattern of warming - that's predicted by greenhouse models does not match the fingerprints of observations, so there is a disconnect between greenhouse models and the actual reality of observations," Singer told Cybercast News Service.

"This means that the greenhouse effect - while real - is not very important in producing climate change," he said. "It's a lot smaller than what the models calculate."

Singer said the reason why the models "overestimate the effectiveness of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is that the models ignore what are called negative feedbacks which occur in the atmosphere, such as clouds, which reduce the effect of the greenhouse gases."

"Their models just don't consider them properly," he said.

But Bracken Hendricks, a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress, told cybercast news service, that the study is "radically out of step with the complete scientific consensus."

"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is not just a report. It's not just a random gathering of scientists. It's the largest scientific body ever assembled," he said. "Their most recent assessment determined that there's 90 percent certainty that global climate change is happening and that it is caused by human beings."

But Singer said, "We have to remember that the climate has always been changing ever since we have records, and we have geologic records going back millions and millions of years. We know that there have been huge climate changes on the earth long before human beings actually came into existence.

"We are fairly sure that what's causing the warming are changes in the sun," he said. "These are very subtle changes that are very difficult to observe. The sun is really a quite variable star."

Hendricks, however, said because of the IPCC report, "the assertion that this is caused by increased solar activity or these sorts of things is out of step with the vast consensus."

"It's dangerous to get into a game of dueling science," he added. "We don't want to be gambling with the fate of the planet."

But Singer said because global warming is a natural event. "There is little point to try to control emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which means that all of this legislation and all of these efforts to find substitutes for fossil fuels are pointless, useless and very, very expensive," he said.

Hendricks countered, saying that alternative energy will be a multi-billion dollar industry and "an opportunity to revitalize our global competitiveness" through innovation and job creation. One fact in particular that is ignored on a regular basis is the very distinct correlation between solar activity and temperature. It has already been demonstrated that Mars is warming (and there are no humans there to cause it), and now comes Neptune. In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters two astronomers demonstrate that not only is it warming, but it is shown that there is a direct link between solar activity and temperature on not only Neptune, but also Earth. Neptune is the planet farthest from the Sun (Pluto is now considered only a dwarf planet), Neptune is the planet farthest from the Earth, and to our knowledge, there has been absolutely no industrialization out at Neptune in recent centuries. There has been no recent build-up of greenhouse gases there, no deforestation, no rapid urbanization, no increase in contrails from jet airplanes, and no increase in ozone in the low atmosphere; recent changes at Neptune could never be blamed on any human influence. Incredibly, an article has appeared in a recent issue of Geophysical Research Letters showing a stunning relationship between the solar output, Neptune's brightness, and heaven forbid, the temperature of the Earth. With its obvious implications to the greenhouse debate, we are certain you have never heard of the work and never will outside World Climate Report.[...] In the recent article, Hammel and Lockwood, from the Space Science Institute in Colorado and the Lowell Observatory, note that measurements of visible light from Neptune have been taken at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona since 1950. Obviously, light from Neptune can be related to seasons on the planet, small variations in Neptune's orbit, the apparent tilt of the axis as viewed from the Earth, the varying distance from Neptune to Earth, and of course, changes in the atmosphere near the Lowell Observatory. Astronomers are clever, they are fully aware of these complications, and they adjust the measurements accordingly.[...] Hammel and Lockwood conclude that "In summary, if Neptune's atmosphere is indeed responding to some variation in solar activity in a manner similar to that of the Earth albeit with a temporal lag" then "Neptune may provide an independent (and extraterrestrial) locale for studies of solar effects on planetary atmospheres." World Climate Report has covered many articles in the scientific literature showing that variations in solar output, including variations within specific wavelengths (e.g., cosmic, ultraviolet, visible, infrared) are highly correlated with temperature variations near the Earth's surface. Believe it or not, when the Sun is more energetic and putting out more energy, the Earth tends to warm up, and when the Sun cools down, so does the Earth. The Hammel and Lockwood article reveals that the same is true out at Neptune; when the Sun's energy increases, Neptune seems to warm up and get brighter given a decade lag. If for some reason you do not believe that the Sun is a significant player in determining the temperature of the Earth (after all, we are told repeatedly that humans are causing most of the observed warming on the Earth), then asked yourself if you believe that Neptune's temperature is controlled by the Sun. How is it possible that the Earth's temperature is so highly correlated with brightness variations from Neptune? The news from Neptune comes to us just weeks after an article was published showing that Mars has warmed as well. If nothing else, we have certainly learned recently that planets undergo changes in their mean temperature, and while we can easily blame human activity here on the Earth, blaming humans for the recent warming on Mars and Neptune would be an astronomical stretch, to say the least.
Interesting. What's the chance you will see information like this published in the Fish Wrapper, or the rest of MSM, for that matter? Exactly none, because that would go against the global warming hype that they like to plaster all over the front page.

I believe global warming is real but is not caused by humans. There are many facts to support human caused global warming assumption but the facts against it are even greater. Global warming is an important issue human caused or not and should be dealt with cautiously.

In conclusion global warming has become an increasingly important issue. There are many facts to believe that global warming is natural and facts to support human involvement. Not only does it effect us now but will become increasingly important throughout the rest of my life.