All causes of climate change listed above can be natural. However, it is well known that the current climate is changing due to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations and humans are directly responsible for the growing concentrations of most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere currently and indirectly responsible for increases in water vapour.
Kano: Your continued cherry picking is rather evident.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/...
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
JZ: More insults from your side I see. I find it humourous that 'deniers' are the only ones complaining about insults. Regardless, climate scientists and other scientists in specific fields have been measuring and recording various forcings for decades now. If a forcing is found or is said to be causing the current temperature changes they put a satellite up or something similar to measure changes in it. Richard Alley went into this in one of his responses in his congressional testimony. Here is his video at the Chapman conference.
Interesting question. But there is no actual 100% proof that humans cause it or don't cause it.
Most scientific research suggests that humans are causing it.
The more carbon dioxide in the air, the more the earth heats up.
Humans cause the increase of CO2 levels on earth, through buring fuels, driving cars, planes, manufacturing etc.
Trees and plants, eat up this carbon dioxide, so they can reduce the level of CO2 in the air, but humans are also cutting down forests at a fast rate.
So this does suggest a strong argument that humans are causing climate change.
Some people argue that it is natural, and climate change has happened throughout history, even before humans were around to influence it. For example, the ice age.
Human activities contribute to climate change by causing changes in Earth’s atmosphere in the amounts of greenhouse gases, aerosols (small particles), and cloudiness. The largest known contribution comes from the burning of fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide gas to the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases and aerosols affect climate by altering incoming solar radiation and out-going infrared (thermal) radiation that are part of Earth’s energy balance. Changing the atmospheric abundance or properties of these gases and particles can lead to a warming or cooling of the climate system. Since the start of the industrial era (about 1750), the overall effect of human activities on climate has been a warming influence. The human impact on climate during this era greatly exceeds that due to known changes in natural processes, such as solar changes and volcanic eruptions.
Jeff may be half right. If drier areas are becoming drier and wetter areas wetter, then maybe it is due to a warming climate. That doesn't mean we are driving the climate warmer. The actual answer is we don't know what percent is natural and what is man caused for warming the air and or water or changes in precipitation. Those that pretend to know are the stupidest among us.
Hello Loopy,
To answer your question it may help to know why the climate changes and for this it’s important to be aware that all types of weather and climate are driven by heat. More specifically, the presence and movement of heat energy between and within the atmosphere, oceans and land.
If something happens that changes either the amount or the distribution of heat energy then the climate will change.
Earth has just one mechanism for retaining heat within the atmosphere and that’s the presence of greenhouse gases. The more of these gases there are the more heat is retained.
Levels of greenhouse gases fluctuate naturally over long periods of time. More recently it’s been human activity that’s increased levels of these gases and today they’re at the highest levels for many millions of years.
Changes in the way Earth moves in space and the relationship with the Sun influence the amount of heat energy received from the Sun, this in turn affects how much heat is retained by the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The answer to your question is that both the effects you mentioned can be caused by long-term natural variations, the sort of changes that happen over hundreds and thousands of years, even millions of years in some cases.
By far the largest influence on the climates in recent years has been human activity and in this respect the current changes we’ve observed are probably more human induced than naturally induced.
I still do not believe the idea that we cause climate to differ; but rather it is another cycle that Earth is undergoing. And this change is very slowly happening, before any major influences start happening, this generation will not be alive.
Ocean temperatures cycle up and down naturally, plus our ability to monitor ocean temperature is severely restricted, our oceans cover 70% of our planet and are an average of 1 kilometer deep.
I don't believe drier areas are becoming drier, the Sahel and Kalahari desert have been having more rain than normal and okay the Indian monsoon was wetter than normal but that's just weather.
Man has had an effect on climate change, but the effect is very small, most is because of natural causes, as evidenced by the 16yrs pause in temperatures and the slight cooling of the last ten years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcru...
It's called climate change to climate change in relation to climate history to a global or regional scale. Such changes occur at different scales of time and climate parameters: temperature, precipitation, cloudiness, etc.. In theory, are due both to natural causes (Crowley and North, 1988) and anthropogenic (Oreskes, 2004).
The term is often used to inappropriately, to refer only to the climate changes that happen in the present, using it as a synonym for global warming. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change climate change uses the term only to refer to human-caused change:
"Climate change" means a change of climate attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
Causes of climate change
Land surface temperature at the beginning of 2000.The spring weather is average, at a given time scale, the weather. The different types of climate and location on the earth's surface are due to certain factors, the main geographic latitude, altitude, distance to sea, land relief orientation with respect to the sun (sunny side and shady) and the direction of the wind (windward and leeward sides) and finally, the sea currents. These factors and their variations over time changes in the major constituents of the atmosphere are also five: air temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind, humidity and rainfall.
But there are considerable fluctuations in these elements over time, the greater the longer the time period considered. These fluctuations occur both in time and space. Fluctuations in time are very easy to check: there may be a year with a summer cold (eg, the tourism sector grew to heavy losses a few years ago on Spanish beaches due to low temperatures and the consequent decline number of visitors, and this winter was much colder than normal, not only in Spain but throughout Europe.) And the spatial fluctuations are even more frequent and verifiable: the effects of very heavy rain in the southern hemisphere tropics of America (floods in Peru and southern Brazil) occurred in parallel with very little rainfall in the area North intertropical South America (especially in Venezuela and other neighboring areas).
A change in the emission of solar radiation in atmospheric composition, the arrangement of continents, ocean currents or the earth's orbit can alter the power distribution and thermal equilibrium, thus profoundly changing the climate planet when it comes to long term processes.
more information http://wwwelblogdepedrob.blogspot.com/20...
Neither of these are causes, they are a result of AGW/climate change which are caused by human greenhouse emissions, primarily CO2 and Methane
Comments of Dr. D. Roy Spencer at the U.S. Senate Hearing “Climate Change: It’s Happening Now”:
It is time for scientists to entertain the possibility that there is something wrong with the assumptions built into their climate models. The fact that all of the models have been peer reviewed does not mean that any of them have been deemed to have any skill for predicting future temperatures. In the parlance of the Daubert standard for rules of scientific evidence, the models have not been successfully field tested for predicting climate change, and so far their error rate should preclude their use for predicting future climate change.
Skeptics and Roger Pielke Jr (whatever he is) totally dismantled warmism (scientifically, economically, rhetorically) at today’s Senate hearing ― embarrassing Democrats who couldn’t run away fast enough. For best coverage, below are links to the JunkScience tweets:
The claim has been made that the extra energy from global warming has mostly bypassed the atmosphere and has been sequestered in the deep ocean, and there is some observational evidence supporting this view. But when we examine the actual, rather weak level of warming (measured in hundredths of a degree C) at depths of many hundreds of meters, it implies relatively low climate sensitivity. Part of the evidence for this result is satellite radiative budget measurements which suggest that more intense El Nino activity since the 1980s caused an apparent decrease in cloudiness, which allowed more sunlight into the climate system, which caused a natural component to recent global warming. Since the global energy imbalance leading to ocean warming since the 1950s is only about 1 part in 1,000 compared to the average rates of solar heating and infrared cooling of the Earth, it should not be surprising that natural climate cycles can cause such small changes in ocean temperature. Even if our ocean temperature measurements of deep warming of hundredths of a degree over the last 50 years are correct, and mostly due to human greenhouse gas emissions, they probably do not support the IPCC’s pessimistic view of future warming.
1) The increase in Ocean temperatures
2) Drier areas are becoming even drier, and wetter areas are becoming even wetter
Are these causes of climate change caused by humans or is it natural?
I have been told that my answer was too long this has never happened before on yahoo so I must be upsetting someone.
So all I can do is post this.
Source(s):
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10...
You are confused and taking consequences and calling them causes. They are not causes of, but consequences of.
No, these are the RESULTS of changes in climate.
The biggest natural cause of changes in climate is the Sun.
Your mom
