I saw a lot of this in another thread but really didn't want to change the flow of that topic and instead am posting here. I'd like to preface this with the fact that I am probably as tree-huggerish as anyone else here. I worked for Ralph Nader and his mighty Green Party army in 2000 (oops!) and previous to that through my work in the Boy Scouts on my path to Eagle I earned a number of conservation awards. However, the scientific background my father imposed on me as a child can't let a myth of global warming perpetuate when the facts behind it are lacking or actually pointing the other directions.

First, the term global warming ... well lets take the definition from EPA's site for one:
According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades. There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities. Human activities have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere through the buildup of greenhouse gases – primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The heat-trapping property of these gases is undisputed although uncertainties (http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/ClimateUncertainties.html) exist about exactly how earth’s climate responds to them.

Now the scientist to first "discover" Global Warming was James E. Hansen and he published his findings in a paper called "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era" at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Hansen claimed that temperatures would increase .35 degrees C over the next 10 years. The reality was that the temperatures increased .11 degrees C. Hansen himself said 10 years later that "the forcings that drive long-term climate change are not known with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change." Additionally the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) itself stated (Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 774) "In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible." or another older quote from 1995 where they stated "Natural climate variability on long time-scales will continue to be problematic for CO2 climate change analysis and detection."

Well then, if we are unable to predict the future how can we even back up a claim of global warming?

Well if it isn't heat being trapped in a CO2 bubble, why are temperatures rising? Anyone who lives in the north during the winter could tell you one possible reason. Ever notice it snows a lot less inside a city than outside? This fact is called Urban Heat Island effect and basically attributes the warmth of a city to be somewhere .1 to 1 degrees warmer than outside of the city due to all the concrete, electricity, and all that jazz. Croplands too are warmer than forests. Now, when a very high percentage of weather stations that used to be out in the middle of nowhere are slowly getting cities and concrete and skyscrapers and asphalt built around them, what would one suspect their temperature readouts to read? Higher.

So the scientists doing weather research go and lower this data slightly to give them data compensated for the urban heat island effect, but the kicker is this data is altered different ways simply depending on who is doing it. And what happens to scientific fact when its altered willy nilly? It becomes science fiction. So they decided to simply look at population change based on the very unreliable census data.

A scientist by the name of Bohm did a study on the urban heat island effect for Vienna, Austria and noted that the population has remained fairly constant from 1950 to the present but their energy use and living space has ultimately doubled. What this would tell you double energy use and double living space would greatly increase the warmth of the city, since the population remained the same the value they altered the data by never changed. Therefore, it continues to get warmer at all of the temperature readout stations around Vienna but no one knows if its because its next to twice as much asphalt as before or a huge killer ball of CO2 gas floating above us ready to eat us all. (R. Bohm, “Urban bias in temperature time series – a case study for the city of Vienna, Austria”).

And now, the planet has warmed about .3 degrees C over the past 30 years according to most leading climatologists. Shanghi, China has warmed over 1 degree C over the last twenty years. (L. Chen, 2003, “Characteristics of the heat island effect in Shanghi) Houston, Texas warmed .8 degrees C. Manchester, England has warmed 8 degrees C (not .8 mind you) over the last 20 years – though that just seems silly doesn’t it? Shouldn’t these values be much lower if we really are warming because of trapped greenhouse gasses?

(All of the following information came from USHCN, and since it’s a US source they used Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. You can convert it in your head, I was too lazy)

But not all cities are warming, either. Each of the cities below exhibited a very smooth and linear decent in temperature over the past century.

McGill, NV from 1930 to 2000 – 1 degree F decrease
Guthrie, Ok from 1930 to 2000 – 1 degree F decrease
Boulder, CO from 1930 to 1997 - .5 degree F decrease
Truman, MO from 1931 to 2000 – 2 degree F decrease
Greenville, SC from 1930 to 2000 – 1.3 degree F decrease
Ann Arbor, MI from 1930 to 2000 – 1 degree F decrease
Syracuse, NY from 1930 to 2000 – 2 degree F decrease
Albany, NY from 1930 to 2000 – 1 degree F decrease
Oswego, NY from 1930 to 2000 - .5 degree F decrease

So if we are globally warming, these cities were kinda left out. New York, NY increased 1 degree F over the past 70 years though, a 3 hour drive from Albany. The CO2 levels in both cities are the same, and while they are factually increasing, one city went up and one city went down. One city got bigger, one city … didn’t. Looking at most European Cities, they’ve gotten colder. Looking at most Asian cities, they’ve gotten warmer. One set grows in population, the other set doesn’t.

There are a whole lot of other facts I’d like to lay out. For starters, in this post-global warming world, the Sahara desert has shrunk gradually since the 1980s. Increased CO2 is actually a pretty good thing I’d think if that’s happening. And while its true that a handful of glaciers are melting, that’s out of one hundred sixty thousand glaciers in the world. Only about sixty-seven thousand have been inventoried and out of those most aren’t melting and many are growing. “There is no obvious common global trend of increasing glacier melt in recent years”(Robert J. Braithwaite, Progress in Physical Geography 26, no 1 (2002), “Glacier mass balance, the first 50 years of international monitoring”)

Maybe these awful hurricanes are a result of global warming. But we had 23 in between 1940 and 1949 and only 14 in 1990-1999. The average has hung around 15 per decade for the past 100 years, perhaps slightly dropping … not increasing. In the 2001 IPPC report, “No long term trends evident for tropical and extratropical storms, and no systematic changes in the frequency of tornadoes, thunder days, or hail” (Executive Summary, Page 2)

To summarize, yes CO2 levels have increased. However the increase is so miniscule (we are talking parts per million here it went up a few hundred if that) and the effects are entirely negligible and even global warming can’t dispute the more obvious claim that we are slowly shifting into the next ice age. Following something such as “global warming” without having factual information in front of you is dangerous, and politics should never interfere with science but this topic is one our politicians are playing with all too much. For example, look at DDT. As Michael Crichton put it, Banning DDT killed more people than Hitler. Since the banning of DDT malaria claimed the life of millions of children and the ban can be attributed to in one way or another to 30 million deaths. DDT was pretty safe too, people ate it every day for 2 years without any harmful effects. (Hayes, 1969). The Sweeney Committee, 25 April 1972 stated “DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man” 2 months before the ban. Ruchelshaus never read the Sweeney report when making their decision. Just months after the ban parathion, its successor, claimed hundreds of farm workers deaths because they weren’t used to handling unsafe chemicals (Wilford, John Noble, “Deaths from DDT Successor Stir Concern”, New York Times 21 August 1970). When an environment movement, sadly made up mostly of people who have the liberal mindset to not do their own research but to jump on board with what everyone else around them is saying, becomes a political movement of such disastrous effects, we have to wonder.

I admit, there are things in the environment that need protecting. I want to cry every time I see road kill or the smog in LA. However the war of greenhouse gasses when ultimately it will cost far more resources than we ever have possible to stem the tide so to speak (unless Texas is willing to be paved over with solar panels, or if we decide that birds don’t deserve life anyway and build giant windmill bird-chopping farms) when these resources could be spent towards finding a way to make us less middle-east oil driven. But before we get into all of that, maybe lets wait to see if a scientist can predict what’s going to happen in the next 10 years successfully and put some weight into what their findings are … because as of right now that’s a scientific impossibility.

I still go with the Pirate theory.

The problem with presenting a case for or against global warming is that it lacks any sort of stastically measurable data. We have an Earth that's billions of years old (or, at least thousands if you're a fundamentalist), and we have only hundreds of years of temperature data -- and only dozens of years of good temperature data from a worldwide standpoint.

Similarly, we don't have another Earth in a sandbox that we can perform any sort of control measurements against. We have no idea what "normal" is.

My gut feeling? We're probably heating up a bit. There's little hard science to support it (for reasons I've outlined above).

Now the scientist to first "discover" Global Warming was James E. Hansen and he published his findings in a paper called "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era" at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. Hansen claimed that temperatures would increase .35 degrees C over the next 10 years.The reality was that the temperatures increased .11 degrees C.

The date 1998 doesn't add up. Typo ?

Now the scientist to first "discover" Global Warming was James E. Hansen and he published his findings in a paper called "Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era" at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998.



Hansen didnt discover global warming it has been recognised as an effect for far longer.


http://www.newscientist.com/popuparticle.ns?id=in22
Timeline: Climate Change

1827: French polymath Jean-Baptiste Fourier predicts an atmospheric effect keeping the Earth warmer than it would otherwise be. He is the first to use a greenhouse analogy.

1863: Irish scientist John Tyndall publishes a paper describing how water vapour can be a greenhouse gas.

1890s: Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius and an American, P C Chamberlain, independently consider the problems that might be caused by CO2 building up in the atmosphere. Both scientists realise that the burning of fossil fuels could lead to global warming, but neither suspects the process might already have begun.

Within global warming some places will rise in temp and some will fall, it is about average global temperature not individual places. If average global temperature is plotted on a graph it shows a trend upward since the industrial revolution around 1750.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:1000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png

If only city data is used isnt that skewing the figures? If only western city data that has nice heat island effect isnt that skewing it more? Average global temperature is from every continent so heat island effect isnt accounting for the figures from Africa, Antartica, Australia. A lot of data is collected from airfields, weather balloons and ocean bouys with no heat island effect.

I have certainly seen in my area a general warming over the last 20 years. Untill about 15 years ago we used to get a few feet of snow every jan/feb and for the last 10 we have had none. But this effect is on timescales we hardly notice year on year that is why I think you have to look at the long term trends.

edit:added graph link

I do not have facts to quote other than from my own parents. They lived in South Dakota for the first 25 plus years of their life and they talk about the blizzards and piles of snow they had. Now they do not have weather like that where they used to live. SD still gets snow but nothing like it used to.

If there is such thing as global warming I do not see us giving up the things we love (ie cars and most anything that has to do with daily luxturies) with the thought it will preserve our atmosphere. And being human we never try to fix a problem unless it is causing trouble in the moment so I say forget about it and just enjoy life. My hope is we can fix it when it does become a problem and need to fix it. *sticks her head in the sand with the rest*

Albany, NY from 1930 to 2000 – 1 degree F decrease

Kelraz:
You hit it fairly well regarding population, but you missed another variable:
Albany used to have *industry* that pumped out all kinds of heat, smog, etc. It was one of the powerhouses of brewing in the pre-Prhohibition U.S.A. All that industry was gone by the 1970s. Couple that with a general decline in population during that time as people fled (the only city worse than Albany in NY is Utica) for anywhere but Albany, and I'm not suprised.

I wonder how many of the other cities with a decrease in temp. had the same kind of variables in play.

Also, there is some evidence that we're coming out of a period of relative cool temperatures (it has been called the little ice age) and that the "global warming" we are seeing is really just a return to normal after centuries of cooler average temperature. The kick in the pants for this whole thing is that the records regarding climate and temperature are really not complete enough to account for any super-macro climate changes that may be a regular part of earth's history. We just don't know enough, we don't have the records, and there is a ton of data that can support arguments from both camps regarding global warming.

For example, if thermohaline circulation in the oceans shut down, we might see a drop in temperatures across Northern Europe and an overall less stable climate there, even as overall temperatures go up on a global scale. The relatively mild climate enjoyed by places like England for their latitude are influenced greatly by the ocean currents near them.

So, is it better to err on the safe side and act as though we're killing the plant, or is it better to assume we're not doing any great harm and continue with business as usual- or, is the best answer (as it so often is) somewhere in the middle?

I'm with Palimax, there just isn't enough scientific evidence available to base an argument for or against.

Also in Earth terms 25 years is like a sneeze. Just like the sun goes through cycles with sunspots who is to say the Earth doesn't go through climate cycles?

I do think we might be heating up some but...isn't there evidence to suggest that the hole in the ozone layer is getting better or at the very least not any worse? I think I heard or read that somewhere.

Sample cores taken from around the world have revealed that the earth goes through natural cycles in both atmospheric CO2 and temperature independent of human activity. There have been many periods in the past with much higher CO2 content than anything envisioned by even the most ardent global warming adherent today. Volcanic activity dwarfs anything done by man as far as CO2 production goes, so in periods where volcanos were especially active, the greenhouse gas content skyrockets.

Does human activity affect greenhouse gas content and therefore temperature? Of course.

Is there anything that humans can do to alter the natural course of Earth's cycles? Not so far. The earth is going to warm and cool all on its own regardless of what we may want, at least until we develop technologies far in advance of what is now possible. Get used to the idea that things constantly change.

All that being said, there are very compelling reasons to put a lot of effort into cleaner and non-petroleum based energy. Weaning ourselves from dependence on the middle east being a major one. Reducing what effect we do have on the atmosphere being another less immediate one. It's never a bad idea to work towards reducing our impact on nature, but one must still live in the modern world and economic/industrial realities have to be taken into account.

The Kyoto treaty would have been a reasonable start if it had not been fatally flawed from the get go. In order for it to have a real impact, *all* countries would have to be required to limit emissions. Once they made the loophole for the "developing" countries, it was fucked. Industry is already moving to China and India for labor costs as it is, so speeding up that process by adding extra costs to operating in the US (where there are existing pollution laws) without any offsetting costs in China (where pollution laws are non existent or at least very lax) makes no sense. If anything it is a recipe to speed up greenhouse gas emissions.

If the world thinks the US is the world's vile polluter, wait and see what happens when 1.2 billion Chinese buy their first family car and the rural regions of that country start to consume electronic goods that require additional power plants to service. All free from any environmental restrictions thanks to the decisions made at Kyoto.

Well yes there's probably alternate ways to look at the data I gave, Albany very well may have been very industrial. But Antartica is recording colder temperatures every year and breaking records constantly. And that wasn't exactly an industrialized nation any point in its history.

And lets not forget that many of the weather stations were maintained by someone going outside, checking the temperature, and writing in a little box with a pencil. Satelite temperature recording is a very very new invention.

I think my point is, human beings are simply too stupid when it comes to this topic. We have no way of knowing and for every shred of evidence for, there's two pieces of evidence against. If someone can actually predict reliably whats gonna happen in 10 years other than a "computer estimate" then we should put our faith in them, because all of the "computer estimates" have turned out wrong.

*edit* That doesn't mean I'm burning styrofoam in my back yard and I do my best to conserve energy, and I'd love to see us all running on electric cars one day, but as long as we have real serious issues such as the fuckup in Iraq over Oil, our efforts should be spent distancing ourselves from Oil ... especially when as of right now there is no other reliable, less pollutant energy solution. Lets spend our money in development not in legislation.

The Earth is warming up; what I like to debate in why. What was it, a decade or so ago that scientists found that the energy output from the sun had been going up over the last 100 years or so?

Michael Crichton's (?) book "State of Fear" is also an interesting read on eco-terrorism and does have alot of the facts you mentioned in it not to mention a few others. Not the best book imho, but does make you think about enviromentalists and the state of the planet.

Note that Crichton's approach is woefully partisan on this issue.

Using core samples, the CO2 levels at different times in history can be measured with general accuracy. I've read more than once that some findings have suggested that CO2 densities have always fluctuated pretty widely and that they very likely could be a result of global warming and not its cause.

I really don't put much stock in the alarmist stance on it, myself. Whatever's going on, it's probably far beyond our control.

Note that Crichton's approach is woefully partisan on this issue.Thormir, I'm a Chrchton fan (hey, I even watch ER) - but I'm not up to speed on his politics on the matter. In what direction is his book skewed? The book a novel, or did he go all Clancey on us and start writing non-fiction and subbing out his novels to co-authors?

To answer Max, based on the article I read from Crichton (which DDT quote is from iirc), I'd say that he's a "human has a little to do with global warming" partisan.

I need to find back this article, and the book apparently, it was really an interesting reading. I even think it was linked here... Google O google, help me!

Edit :
Posted almost 2 years ago :
http://forums.ayonae.ro/showthread.php?t=1212

No DDT quote as I thought tho.

Yeah, Crichton is the polar opposite of the global warming alarmist (the article Anterak kindly dredged up is even more sensationalist than I remember). I have only read excerpts of the book Crystana mentions but remember the environmentalists being depicted as caricatured lunatics (not that there aren't lunatic environmentalists, but the slant seemed quite against them as reasonable people).

I've enjoyed many of his books since I was a teen, but I find his arguments against global warming to be on par with Exxon's.

I actually pulled quite a few of those statistics from the same sources Crichton used, after my dad and I debated the subject he had me read Crichtons book and then he shared with me a lot of the research his own company (General Electric Water Technologies) has done on the ecosystem regarding global warming and we went through and fact checked a lot of Crichton's sources. Then another 50% of my sources I pulled from research my dad did at GE or stuff I found myself.

Long and short of it though is that if what Sanchek said is true, then it probably doesn't matter. Even if it is human interaction that increased CO2, it might not be a detriment but actually could be quite positive (more CO2 means plants grow better, and not like we're starved for oxygen when its a vast portion of our atmosphere where CO2 is very minimal) and lastly if CO2 is bad and humans are making CO2, we don't even know how to stop it yet so before we flush billions down the crapper on it better try to figure it out first -- prove whats happening, not just guess, and then find reasonable solutions.

The suggestion I read was that global warming trends caused higher than normal evaporation of the oceans, which raised the CO2 concentration. I'm not sure if that makes any scientific sense at all, so take it with a grain of salt.

I'm not particularly worried, this planet (and the life on it) has supposedly survived several giant meteor impacts and other significant events. A couple hundred years of greenhouse emissions won't cause permanent damage or at least the human civilization will run out of fossil fuels long before that.

I don't have the time right now to dig a link out but there was an interesting article on New Scientist about some solid evidence that the planet itself is capable of regulating greenhouse gas concentration. Something about the higher temperature causes increased raining which in turn is washing limestone into the sea which in turn causes more CO2 to be absorbed (don't ask how it works, this isn't exactly my field).

Now, if greenhouse gases and pollution in general will or will not cause more hardship and suffering to our children or grandchildren is a totally different question in my opinion.
We should be more worried about the short term (ie a century) impact of our activities than the long term effects.