Global warming skeptics.

The Relic · 07-23-2008, 09:23 AM

There's been a shift in the babble from the woodwork recently. Two to three years ago there was a constant murmur from those who refused to believe that global warming was real and already with us; now there are few who are so thoroughly stupid as to try that one on. Rather, these days they say that there is no evidence to support the notion that accelerated global warming is caused by emissions generated by mankind.

The thing is that they are supported by a mixture of pseudo-science and urban myth, stuff that has become standard talk in the pub, on the internet and in the letters page of the Daily Mail, the sort of arrant nonsense that that Jeremy Clarkson routinely spews out.

All of it is easily refutable, but it's taken on a life of its own. A classic example is the response to the news that the North Pole may well display open water this Summer. Pub wisdom has it that this isn't caused by global warming at all, but by the volcanic activity that has been detected in the Arctic. The fact that basic rules of physics hold that heat transference will be localised is neither here nor there to these people - for them the icecap is being melted by volcanoes!

Anyone want to say why they believe accelerated global warming isn't caused by man, or knock a few of the myths down for themselves.

**Will** · 07-23-2008, 10:54 AM

I think you may have mis-understood the relationship between volcanos and gloabl warming Relic. It's not the heat that volcanos produce which contributes to global warming. It's the millions of tons of CO2 they produce that is the problem. Ironically, if this were a dead planet with no volcanic activity, the planet would have never been warm enough to support life, because there wouldn't be enough CO2 to warm up the atmosphere.

The crux of the debate is how significant human kinds' contribution to CO2 emissions is, and also exactly what effect that is having, for instance the Southern Polar Monthly Mean Temperature Anomalies show a cooling trend for the last 27 years. Also the sun is acting very strangely at the moment, it hasn't produced any black spots in between cycles, this is not normal (to current observations) for these periods to last this long. This is important as when the sun is in it's low-activity phase, it's magnetic field isn't as capable of deflecting cosmic rays away from us effectively.

The Earth's magnetosphere is also possibly on the verge of reshaping itself, this would have significant effects on the atmosphere and how temperature trapping gasses are distributed though the stratosphere.

No one has every been in doubt the globe is warming up significantly, there's just a lot of debate about how much it has to do with humans.