Climate Change: Caused by Man?

[I_FH]

Where do you sit on climate change? Personally I think the planet is heating up but I'm tend to think it's more of a natural cycle. I ask after reading elsewhere someone suggesting Dawkins is a global warming skeptic and assuming his supporters were not.

I did search for related threads and I use the word Man in general terms

[mophosophical]

I can't see how anyone who has put any effort at all into reading up on the science can deny that it is both real and caused by man.

What makes you think it's a natural cycle?

I highly doubt Dawkins is a global warming denialist. Do you have a source for this?

edit: note I use the term global warming denialist, rather than global warming skeptic. This is because I consider the use of the word skeptic in this manner wrong. I'm a skeptic. I'm skeptical of everything. To be skeptical is to come to rational conclusions based on evidence. If you call yourself a skeptic and you don't think global warming is real; you're doing it wrong.

[I_FH]

My bad. Searched for climate and got no hits.

The suggestion Dawkins is a skeptic was in a comment relating to the QandA debate. Not on this board and not overly important.

My opinion is based on being taught for years that sea levels rise and fall. The planet goes through a cycle. Now sea levels are changing, as they've done since the oceans formed, and it's man caused? I'll look this up but aren't we still in an ice age?

We should be taking steps to prepare for rising seas but to claim we can prevent them through taxing carbon and wind farms is just wrong.

[I_FH]

From the unquestionable words of Wikipedia...

Originally Posted by Wikipedia's page on Ice Age

An ice age, or more precisely, a glacial age, is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or alternatively "glacials" or "glaciations" or colloquially as "ice age"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.[1] By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets still exist.[2]

^ J. Imbrie and K. P. Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Short Hills, NJ: Enslow Publishers) 1979.
^ J. Gribbin, Future weather (New York: Penguin) 1982.

[Sieveboy]

Originally Posted by I_FH

From the unquestionable words of Wikipedia...

Just a point that might not come through here, is that we entered the current interglacial period ~15,000 years ago and sea levels stopped rising about 6,000 years ago and have been stable since, until more recently. Sea levels rise and fall inline with changes in stmospheric temperatures which draw water into and out of the cryosphere., which can also affect salinity and the chemistry of the oceans and lots of other things. This is natural and normal. Lots of climate change (anti)sceptics like to claim that what is being seen today is a consequnce of this natural movement (but rarely do they provide credible evidence for this hypothosis).

Sea level rises might be between a few cm and half a meter, which is scary for island nations or Bangladesh, less so even for people on the Australian coast lines where we have few really shallow coast and hinterlands. The real scary factor is the one all the climate change (anti)sceptics do not realise (usually because their dickheads conflating daily and seasonal local weather patterns with global multidecadal forecasting) is that higher atmospheric CO2 levels make the ocean more acidic, this leads to coral bleaching and a host of other things which are not desirable. Whilst some biological things may thrive under these conditions, the long term consequences are uncertain. This scares me more than sea levels rising and falling. Food for thought.

[I_FH]

Uncertain yes but the planet has been through this before. Carbon Dioxide levels have been higher. Some species will thrive, others won't.

[FSM]

Global warming is real.
Our contribution to it is real, although by exactly how much will be a continued (and possibly never ending) source of research.
We are screwing this planet like never before, and that can't be good.
What I don't necessarily buy into though is some of the global catastrophe stuff being thrown around, and the figures plucked out of models of X degC rise per % of CO2.
My engineering bullshit meter goes off every time I see long time frame numbers from highly complex (and possibly the worlds most complex) models being thrown around as fact.
But I do understand the political importance of having such numbers and targets, because without those, it's hard to sell the desired and necessary change.

But there are several things I put above global warming on the global threat scale:
1) Nuclear weapons
2) Over population
3) Pesky asteroids with our name on it.

Possibly in that order.

Dave.

[TheOneThatWasntChosen]

I personally think it's a man-made phenomenon. I also think we have the responsibility to do something about it, but that's going off-topic, I think.

[Coryate]

Yes, it's been much hotter, and yes it's been much colder, and these have happen due to planetary cycles.

But this is different, and the research is overwhelming that humans are the cause, and that it will get worse.

Personally I would believe NASA, the Royal Society, the Australian Academy of Science, and pretty much every science society on the planet who agree that it's real, than Ian Plimer and Lord Monckton.

It's also noticeable the denialism is far higher in the main English speaking countries, and absent in the more science literate European countries.

Most people wonder "When will it stop?" I reply "Why do you think it will?"

[DezinerAU]

Originally Posted by I_FH

Uncertain yes but the planet has been through this before. Carbon Dioxide levels have been higher. Some species will thrive, others won't.

So even though we could arguably do something about it, we shouldn’t? We here in the western world will be capable of buying our way out of trouble. But what about the poorest people who’ve contributed the least to the problem? Encroaching deserts and rising sea levels are big problems for a lot of people. We just leave them to their fates and write it off as “survival of the fittest”?

The problem is getting people to care about others who can’t look after themselves. I think this is why conservative types are generally against acting on climate change (and as a result denying that it’s even happening in the first place): they’re often about personal responsibility above and beyond social responsibility. Acting on climate changes involves social responsibility (i.e SOCIALISM!), therefore climate change isn’t happening :face palm:

My opinion is based on being taught for years that sea levels rise and fall. The planet goes through a cycle. Now sea levels are changing, as they've done since the oceans formed, and it's man caused?

More visceral “feelings” and appeal to incredulity. Just because you can’t imagine that something is true, doesn’t mean it isn’t (see: quantum theory). Just because you’ve been taught something all your life, does’t make it true (see: all religion ever imagined). Just because something has always been one way, doesn’t mean it can’t change (see: gay marriage).

What it really comes down to is trust. Do you trust the scientists who have studied for years on data collected for decades about the climate dating back for millennia? Or do you trust political-partisan hacks who have a clear anti-action anti-tax anti-socialism agendas?