Global Warming?

Well, I used to be open to both sides of the arguement. We know that they temperatures are rapidly changing and we've all watched Al Gore's Movie. However, after I talked to my Physics teacher about Global Warming, he's made a really good case against it.

First of all: Al Gore's movie. According to him, it's a huge pile of doodoo. Do people remember that graph in that movie? The one that has the CO2 and Tmperature over time? The huge sine wave thingy? That time went over by 1000 year units, if I remember correctly. Well, my teacher pulled out another graph, showing the relationship between temperature and CO2 levels. When looking at the graph more closely (units of 100 years), the whole class saw that CO2 had no real relationship with rise and fall of temperature.

Second: The sun varies in it's power output. Over the millenniums, the sun has produced more or less power (i dont know the real science behind that). His arguement is that the sun is simply producing more energy that before.

Third: When the sun produces more energy than before, more heat is absorbed by the seas. When water heats up, the O2 and all the other gases in it rise to the surface. In the ocean, there are HUGE reserves of CO2. When the seas heat up, CO2 is simply radiated from the seas, and that's where the whole CO2 reserves are coming from.

His arguement is that the world is simply going through another climate change that Earth always goes through. (Ice Age anyone?)

Also, according to him, Global Warming became a bigger issue than before because of Britain. Britain's PM wanted to get rid of the power of the coal industry because they were going on strike and she didn't like that. So she told a whole panel of scientists that she'll give them research grants if they find out why coal is bad for everyone. One scientist told her that a scientist in Sweden made a theory that the CO2 emissions from coal contribute the Global Warming, and through that, Global Warming became well known.

However, this doesn't mean that we should just keep on burning fossil fuels and keep on going this way. It's still unhealthy for the environment and bad for our cities and the places where we live (acid rain anyone?)

I'm wondering what other people think about this?

It's a shame there's not a wide-spreading full length movie out there counteracting almost every one of Gore's points.

For example, he shows a nuclear explosion as a result of global warming. Did I miss something here?

Anyway, let's not forget that Volcanoes have released much more Co2 then the most extreme anti-global people could ever dream of doing.

^

there are lots of movies like that, but they just aren't as famous cuz there's no politicians in it

I'm wondering what other people think about this?

Scientists are discussing the topic, not being 100% sure what's causing the temperature-increase. In the meantime, better to be safe than sorry.

 Spoiler

First of all: Al Gore's movie. According to him, it's a huge pile of doodoo. Do people remember that graph in that movie? The one that has the CO2 and Tmperature over time? The huge sine wave thingy? That time went over by 1000 year units, if I remember correctly. Well, my teacher pulled out another graph, showing the relationship between temperature and CO2 levels. When looking at the graph more closely (units of 100 years), the whole class saw that CO2 had no real relationship with rise and fall of temperature.

Second: The sun varies in it's power output. Over the millenniums, the sun has produced more or less power (i dont know the real science behind that). His arguement is that the sun is simply producing more energy that before.

Like this one?


Doesn't prove that CO2 nor the sun has anything to do with the average temperature on earth though.

Third: When the sun produces more energy than before, more heat is absorbed by the seas. When water heats up, the O2 and all the other gases in it rise to the surface. In the ocean, there are HUGE reserves of CO2. When the seas heat up, CO2 is simply radiated from the seas, and that's where the whole CO2 reserves are coming from.

I thought it was the opposite: That you could store a ton of CO2 in the ocean. That's what I heard from my science-teacher at least. But, meh, scientists are discussing the topic.

His arguement is that the world is simply going through another climate change that Earth always goes through. (Ice Age anyone?)

Heard something like that as well. Personally, it doesn't make sense though. Why would the average temperature increase if we're getting an ice age soon?

I just like how all the greenhouse gases are really common elements in the atmosphere and on Earth =P

Oh well, in 20~40 years there's just no petrol to put in any car.
Humanity has to switch to Hydrogen/Electric cars and Nuclear Fusion / Windturbine / Solarpower powerplants by then...

The only real question is, will it be 20 or 40 years till the petrol will be gone for good.

Humanity will only change when there's just -NO- other way that's simpler to come by, so I would say:

LET'S MASS WASTE ALL PETROL ASAP, SO WE CAN MOVE ON TO THE FUTURE!

Oh well, in 20~40 years there's just no petrol to put in any car.
Humanity has to switch to Hydrogen/Electric cars and Nuclear Fusion / Windturbine / Solarpower powerplants by then...

The only real question is, will it be 20 or 40 years till the petrol will be gone for good.

Humanity will only change when there's just -NO- other way that's simpler to come by, so I would say:

LET'S MASS WASTE ALL PETROL ASAP, SO WE CAN MOVE ON TO THE FUTURE!

that is wrong, the thing with petrol is that it will become way too expensive to obtain, not that it will end completely. Also, there is a lot of research going on on alternative fuels, people are not "zomg petrol" anymore.

trust me, once everyone in the world takes an entry level geology class, they will learn that the earth has periods of warmings, and periods of cooling, ALL NATURAL. And we just happen to be coming off of a cooling period, so there aint much we can do about it.

People are just paranoid. When the earth starts cooling down, it will be "OMGZ ICE AGE!!!"

Al Gore's movie should have been called "A Convenient Lie". Global Warming or Climate Change(they cant be wrong whatever happens with this phrase) as they like to now call it, is nothing more than a media beat up used by Governments to scare people into control/submission.

trust me, once everyone in the world takes an entry level geology class, they will learn that the earth has periods of warmings, and periods of cooling, ALL NATURAL. And we just happen to be coming off of a cooling period, so there aint much we can do about it.

Yeah, and since the industrial revolution we've hopped off that track for good. You can't screw around with the atmosphere and expect nothing to happen. It's not so much natural periods, as stable states, which switch back and forth every so often.

As the CO2 (and other greenhouse gas) levels go up, what happens? Temperature rises. This leads to more gas being released (particularly water vapour, which is a pretty powerful greenhouse gas, and has an evaporation level exponentially dependent on temperature). And the temperature just keeps going up. The end result is like Venus - it gets hotter and hotter, the rocks are literally melting. Venus is only 70% the distance to the sun, but the surface temperature there is near triple that on earth (in Kelvins obviously), primarily due to greenhouse effect.


And remember, humanity has come to exist entirely in the most recent interglacial period. There were no humans in the last ice age, at least not of the homo sapiens variety. We can't say what'll happen because it never has.

There's always interesting info on Andrew Bolt's blog here.

He has a lot to say about it if you want to search older pages.

im for it even if the info is not accurate. since the masses are morons(look at maple as a whole) im not above the duping them to have a better outcome.

the only problem is with you have such a dumb race as humans, we're bound to screw it up somehow. right now everyone is concerned about CO2 emissions, fine, but what people dun realize is their dumping of foreign chemicals has long lasting negative effects into the environment, but releases relatively low CO2s. =T.

we're gonna have a low carbon atmosphere but a toxic plastic sewage ocean. great T_T

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechang.../keyfacts/
I suggest you all take a look at this site. There are around 300 of the top scientists working at the Met Office Hadley Centre, modelling climate change. Personally, I'd trust them over a single Physics teahcer.
Also, Al Gore's movie did contain mostly lies... which is called politics.... which is to be expected because he is a politician.

There's multiple counter arguments to the correlation between Global Warming and CO2 levels, and I once watched a video with scientists stating that global warming and cooling has occurred naturally throughout the Earth's lifespan; rather than high CO2 levels causing a rise in temperature, they suggested that previous data indicated the Earth's natural rise in temperature in turn caused higher CO2 levels.

I'm not saying I believe this, but I thought it was interesting. If I can find a link to the video I'll post it.

Oy vey.

I realize that Al Gore is a plum, but look at the numbers.

By far the vast majority of the world's leading climate-studying scientists (who study the climate, unlike your physics teacher, who does not study the climate) agree with the following statement: "Global warming has begun, is very likely (meaning 90%+ probability)to have been caused by man, and is an unstoppable force that will ravage the planet for centuries."

I realize that teenagers like to think that their actions have no real consequences, but come on. Grow up.

Scientists are discussing the topic, not being 100% sure what's causing the temperature-increase. In the meantime, better to be safe than sorry.

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO2, are melting the ice cap

This also reminds me of America's love for the fad of the hybrid car. The sheeple prefer to gawk at the Toyota Prius [sic] giving 45 mpg. All the while ignoring the massive environmental impact the production of its batteries causes. Acid rain anyone?

Unfortunately, if only we could buy the highly fuel-efficient European cars. For example, both the Volkswagen Polo Bluemotion and Ford Fiesta ECOnetic diesel engines can do over 60 mpg. Heck, even a huge twin-turbo V6 diesel engine Jaguar XJ6 TDVi can achieve pretty good mpg. A tank-full of diesel was able to drive 750 miles, even though the fist half to two-thirds of the trip was done wastefully and at 75 mph (Top Gear season 12, episode 4).

Oy vey.

I realize that Al Gore is a plum, but look at the numbers.

By far the vast majority of the world's leading climate-studying scientists (who study the climate, unlike your physics teacher, who does not study the climate) agree with the following statement: "Global warming has begun, is very likely (meaning 90%+ probability)to have been caused by man, and is an unstoppable force that will ravage the planet for centuries."

I realize that teenagers like to think that their actions have no real consequences, but come on. Grow up.

The IPCC is composed of around 2,000 scientists correct? Lets ignore the fact that some scientists on that list either no longer support the panel and even threatened to sue to remove their names or had their names added without their consent. Seems like a mighty number, but how does that compare to 31,000 scientists who reject the "'global warming' agena"?

Indeed, go look at the numbers. The true numbers.

As to who we can blame for this outright lie that there's a "consensus" on the issue (even though that in itself holds no place in science), we can all point a finger on history professor Naomi Oreskes. Since science is all about peer review (i.e. another scientist performs experiments/research to confirm said claim) medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte repeated her query into the database. The fact of the matter is there doesn't exist this "consensus" that the zombie-like mass media and politicians fart out. (source)



So, with all this scare of the ocean rising by 20 feet or whatever in the future because of the melting ice caps and whatnot, does anyone want to guess what percent of Earth's water is actually ice? 2%? 10%? 20%? 40%? According to Wikipedia it's around 2%, though it provides both figures of 2.4% in the introductionary paragraph and 1.8% almost half-way down (link). Also, as water turns into ice its volume increases by 9%. With 70.9% of the Earth's surface being covered by water (citation taken from here) and about 0.145% of the global sea ice being lost (source), I believe you guys should know in which direction this is heading to.

As local meteorologist John Coleman once said, "Global warming is a choice." 8 hours until the first 2x exp session, so a sleepy toodles~

I'm just a teenager, but the argument against Global Warming does seem to make more sense to me. Hasn't the Earth gone through warm and cold periods throughout history?
I thought that the dinosaurs lived in a warm period and then the Earth changed into an Ice Age, or am I mistaken?

I wanna learn mah sciences. @_@

We actually talked about this in my statistics class. Sure, there is data showing a correlation between temperature change and greenhouse gas emissions, however correlation does NOT directly imply causation. There is another variable, the natural oscillations of the earth's temperature. As far as I know, there has not been a study that has effectively discerned which is causing which.

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO2, are melting the ice cap

This also reminds me of America's love for the fad of the hybrid car. The sheeple prefer to gawk at the Toyota Prius [sic] giving 45 mpg. All the while ignoring the massive environmental impact the production of its batteries causes. Acid rain anyone?

This article has been widely trashed for being unscientific and inaccurate. They make some convenient assumptions (for example, that the Prius will be scrapped after 80,000 miles, while the Hummer will last over 300,000) that lead to their findings. If you build 4 Priuses and 1 Hummer, you'd tend to lose out on the fuel advantages of the Prius.

The IPCC is composed of around 2,000 scientists correct? Lets ignore the fact that some scientists on that list either no longer support the panel and even threatened to sue to remove their names or had their names added without their consent. Seems like a mighty number, but how does that compare to 31,000 scientists who reject the "'global warming' agena"?

Indeed, go look at the numbers. The true numbers.

As to who we can blame for this outright lie that there's a "consensus" on the issue (even though that in itself holds no place in science), we can all point a finger on history professor Naomi Oreskes. Since science is all about peer review (i.e. another scientist performs experiments/research to confirm said claim) medical researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte repeated her query into the database. The fact of the matter is there doesn't exist this "consensus" that the zombie-like mass media and politicians fart out. (source)

When has number of scientists (or people with bachelor of science) who agree with a theory determine whether it's correct?

So, with all this scare of the ocean rising by 20 feet or whatever in the future because of the melting ice caps and whatnot, does anyone want to guess what percent of Earth's water is actually ice? 2%? 10%? 20%? 40%? According to Wikipedia it's around 2%, though it provides both figures of 2.4% in the introductionary paragraph and 1.8% almost half-way down (link). Also, as water turns into ice its volume increases by 9%. With 70.9% of the Earth's surface being covered by water (citation taken from here) and about 0.145% of the global sea ice being lost (source), I believe you guys should know in which direction this is heading to.

Going by the numbers on Wikipedia, it's easy to work it out. 25 million cubic km of ice. The Earth's total surface area is 361 million square km of water.

If all of that melted, and distributed evenly, it would end up being a 70m rise (it'll end up being less, since it spreads over low lying areas, eg. Bangladesh, England, New York). So the 0.145% per year represents ~10cm(4 inches) per year. In 30 years that's a 10 foot rise... and that's only if we continue at current rates.


The amount we can take from the past is limited by what we know about it. There's evidence of warm and cold periods but not so great information about what caused them. On the other hand, we know that the carbon dioxide levels have been rising steadily for the last century, and it is almost certainly due to the mass consumption of carbon based fuels. The increase in farm food animals (cows etc.) probably contributes as well, due to methane etc. But being out of control of one aspect doesn't mean the other ones are invalid. Even if climate change is due to something out of our hands, we can reduce the impact by changing things we're doing to inflate it.