1. 

I have to start by saying I am an Environmental Scientist with a BS in Environmental Science. Does that make me a climate expert? No.

In my opinion people are WAY too caught up in politics to have a thoughtful exchange of ideas on this topic. If you're getting your information from a talking head with an agenda then you're wrong. Period. Those heads are paid to make you think a certain way for their bosses benefit and to get ratings.

Global warming is about pollution. We all agree that pollution is bad. (or we should) What our goal should be is to lower pollution of all kinds. In this case, air pollution. No one wants to go outside and have brown clouds surrounding them, or to have to wear a mask to breathe. Google "Air Pollution, China". That is what some people would have your town look like. Money over health.

The technology exists to lower emissions, but the industrialists are too greedy to care about your health or your environment. You should be angry about this. Instead we argue, is Global Warming real or fake? It is not the real concern.

My last thought on this. The old saying is, better safe than sorry. Why is it any different in this case? If there are two doors, you KNOW without a doubt if you go through one door everything will be fine, but the other door you're told there may be a chance you will die, your kids may die, everyone you know may die and the world as you know it may be altered for the worse forever become uninhabitable, which door do you choose?

If you ask anyone about global warming do not expect an unbiased answer.

I would start from the graphs and see what you can see. I have attached some. Look for any recent changes. Be aware that the start point of a graph can seriously affect any trend.

When you hear a claim that something is unprecedented check the graphs for a precedent. There usually is one!

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Climates change. They are never static. It was generally warm 2000 and 1000 years ago. It was colder 500 years ago. It has generally been warming for 300 years but there were minor ups and downs such as the down in the 1970s.

<<>> From the 70s to 2000s

<<>> No the Holocene optimum was about 7 thousand years ago and it has been generally cooling since then with minor ups and downs like the up we are having now.

<<>> I think you have to ask how much are we affecting by all of our emissions including CO2 and aerosols. Some like to include methane from cows and rice paddies etc as but that typically doesn't include previous animals cows and rice paddies.

<<>Humans have emitted enough CO2 to increase the CO2 in the atmosphere by about 150 ppmV. It has risen about a hundred based on most proxies so the maximum we have added is about 100 ppmV of the current 400 ppmV in the atmosphere.

Oceans do and oceans will create rock from precipitated carbonates. Plants absorb CO2 as they always have but they give it back when they are eaten or decompose so there isn't much of a net difference.

<>>

Far less than humans do now but probably most of the 300 ppmV in the atmosphere before was CO2 recycled through a volcano. Previously volcanoes spewed CO2 which got absorbed into the ocean which converted it to carbonates which built up formations miles thick and thousands of square miles of carbonates. It is an ongoing process that has been happening for billions of years. The CO2 concentration was not static before humans. Some proxies indicate it was relatively stable. Plant stomata proxies indicate much more CO2 variability than alarmists will allow.

● A lot of people claim there is controversy around global warming. What are the unbiased facts of global warming?

Earth naturally warms and cools due to changes in it’s orbit, fluctuations in the amount of heat energy radiated by the Sun and natural variations on the planet. Over long periods of time these changes can be significant and explain things such as the coming and going of the ice-ages.

More recently the planet has been warming but this has happened at a time when the net effect of natural variations has been a cooling one. This recent rate of warming is much greater than anything that has ever before been known to happen on Earth (excepting bolide collisions, massive meteor strikes and other one off catastrophic events).

Nearly 1,000 years ago it was comparatively warm, a time known as the Medieval Warm Period. It took 1,000 years of natural warming to cause a 0.5°C rise in temperatures. Since the onset of manmade global warming temperatures have been rising 30 times as fast.

2000 years: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Fil...

130 years: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Fil...

Warming or cooling is dependent upon the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this is the only mechanism our planet has for retaining heat. As concentrations go up or down the temperature reacts accordingly. For millions of years levels had been fairly static (between 180 and 290 parts per million by volume). In the last 150 years levels have risen to 400ppmv, higher than at any time during the last 15 million years and a rising 100 times faster than any natural variation can cause.

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Fil...

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/7...

● Studies show the Earth is warming over the decades. But hasn't Earth been warming since the ice age? Or is the warming being sped up unnaturally by humans?

The last ice-age has ended, this means the warming that caused it to end has finished and we are now in a cooling phase.

Changes in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the Sun (orbital eccentricity) cause the advance and retreat of glacial ice over a 95,000 year cycle. This sees the planet cool for approx 84,000 years then warm over a period of approx 11,000 years. The warming is more pronounced due to feedback mechanisms that increase the rate of warming. During a full glacial cycle (ice-age) the temperature swing is 7°C, other natural cycles will either amplify or attenuate the temperature variation such that the range throughout a full glacial cycle will be between 6°C and 8°C.

The last warming phase commenced 19,000 years ago and ended 8,000 years ago. Since then Earth has been in the cooling phase and until recently the temperature drop had been about 0.7°C. The recent warming has more than compensated for all the cooling since the end of the last ‘ice-age’.

Holocene Temp Variations: http://www.globalwarmingart.com/images/b...

● How much do the emissions of cars and factories effect the atmosphere? Don't plants, rocks and the oceans absorb the co2 emissions?

In 2012 humans emitted about 34 billion tonnes of CO2 and the equivalent of a further 14 billion tonnes in the form of other greenhouse gases. During the same period natural sources such as the oceans, biomass and soils emitted about 210 billion tonnes.

By comparison our contribution is quite small. The reason our emissions are significant is because the natural ones are part of a balanced cycle, whilst nature emits 210Gt per year it also absorbs 210Gt per year and so a balance is maintained.

We on the other hand only release emissions. Natural processes do remove about half our CO2 emissions (less for the other greenhouse gases), the remaining 15Gt is accumulating in the atmosphere and in the last 100 years or so the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by a third.

● How much co2 do volcanoes put into our atmosphere?

It varies from one year to the next, from time to time there are major eruptions that can emit over 100 million tonnes of CO2. The annual global average is about 200 million tonnes. To put it another way, humans produce 150 times as much CO2 as volcanoes do.

http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/volcanowatch/arch...

http://ieet.org/images/global_temp.jpg

take a look at this graph and come to your own conclusions.

Are we still "cycling" at the same rate as we have in the past?

What world events happened in the 1900s and the 2000s?

Has the earth ever been at higher temperatures?

The graph doesn't go that far back into time, but you can do your own research (this literally took 2 min. to find) and find a graph that goes back thousands of years.

Whatever graph you find, most likely it will tell the same story, unless it is some crap graph from some idiot with no appreciation for scientific research.

http://rps3.com/Files/Ochkosh_2010_talks...

This document is by Burt Rutan. He designed and built the airplane that went around the world non-stop. He analyses most aspects of AGW using the IPCC accepted documentation. It is a good place to start.

these are all standard denier points. you can check skepticalscience and follow links to scientific papers they provide.

I'll just touch one now. Humans emit 100 times more than all volcanoes every years. Check the US Geologicalsurvey site. The myth probably comes from Plimer, a geologist in Australia who cannot do simple math from burning fossil fuels- this stuff has to go somewhere.

a real skeptic would check his assumptions. There is plenty of books in universities on this.

The earth has cooled down and warmed up for millions of years. The ice in the Antarctic goes down thousands of years, and they can take core samples and see melting/freezing/inches of snowfall year by year, back at least 10,000 years.

So yes, the earth NATURALLY warms and cools, and has been doing so probably forever. Some scientists see a pattern in this, but there are also random factors.

BUT the earth has never warmed up 1/100th as quickly as it has for the last 20 years or so. The natural cycle of warming and cooling has never been even 1% of the rise in the average temperature of the atmosphere in the last 20 years.

Now back to those ice cores for a minute. There has also been an effort to measure the CO2 content of the atmosphere back through history. CO2 is a 'greenhouse gas', and higher levels of it trap more heat in the atmosphere. There are other greenhouse gasses but CO2 is the major one. Millions of years ago, before there was any animal life on earth, the earth was very green with plants. It was like the whole earth was a tropical jungle. The atmosphere had very high CO2 levels then, in fact oxygen was considered 'poison' by plants. But plants breathe out oxygen, and eventually, over millions of years, oxygen levels in the atmosphere got up to about 20% of the whole atmosphere, as it is today. That's how animal life was able to thrive, because we breathe oxygen. You know how nature reaches a balance? The natural balance of atmospheric gasses has to do with plants doing better with higher levels of CO2, animals doing better with higher levels of oxygen.

So there are tiny air bubbles trapped in those ice cores, air trapped by snow that fell thousands of years ago. And we can see from those how CO2 levels have increased dramatically just in the last 200 years or so. Just since the Industrial Revolution and the enormous growth in human population in the last couple of centuries. (There was a guy also doing a study of buttons on military uniforms! Military buttons are made of brass and for centuries they've been made of two pieces, with some air trapped in the middle! This guy has been borrowing or buying these antique buttons, drilling tiny holes in them and testing the air inside. This gives even more information, but only for the last 200-300 years.)

OBJECTIVE science shows global warming. The earth warming faster than it has in thousands of years. Warming causing a melting of polar ice. Glaciers disappearing.

And, as predicted, a relatively small warming of the atmosphere will intensity weather all around the globe. Weather, things like thunderstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, even blizzards, are caused by the contrast between masses of warm and cold air, or masses of high and low pressure air (again closely related to temperature). Scientists predicted decades ago that we would start seeing more and more intense hurricanes tornadoes and even snowstorms. And that's happening! Look at the yearly numbers for damage caused by tornadoes in the US midwest or hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, and you can see it.

Does anyone really think that ALL that evidence is just being faked by scientists who want to make more money? Or by Al Gore so he can sell his books?

google the sceptics handbook, Jo Nova explains it well

A lot of people claim there is controversy around global warming. What are the unbiased facts of global warming?

Studies show the Earth is warming over the decades. But hasn't Earth been warming since the ice age? Or is the warming being sped up unnaturally by humans?

How much do the emissions of cars and factories effect the atmosphere? Don't plants, rocks and the oceans absorb the co2 emissions?

How much co2 do volcanoes put into our atmosphere?

I'm very interested in this topic and I want to know the unbiased truth.. not the political or religious biased views