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Global Warming Debate


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Spin from BBC:

 

 

 

From a reasonable scientist (from the same article)-

 

And if you go back to the Vikings age it was much hotter and green, that's why it's called Greenland.

 

Quote from the same scientist:

"But if we continue to observe melting events like this in upcoming years, it will be worrisome."

 

Let's hope it's just a cyclical event.

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I will wade in here. First, and oddly, we are in an ice age. Read about ice ages and the major factors causing them.

 

The causes of ice ages are not fully understood for both the large-scale ice age periods and the smaller ebb and flow of glacial–interglacial periods within an ice age. The consensus is that several factors are important: atmospheric composition, such as the concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (the specific levels of the previously mentioned gases are now able to be seen with the new ice core samples from EPICA Dome C in Antarctica over the past 800,000 years[39] ); changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun known as Milankovitch cycles (and possibly the Sun's orbit around the galaxy); the motion of tectonic plates resulting in changes in the relative location and amount of continental and oceanic crust on the Earth's surface, which affect wind and ocean currents; variations in solar output; the orbital dynamics of the Earth-Moon system; and the impact of relatively large meteorites, and volcanism including eruptions ofsupervolcanoes.[citation needed]

Some of these factors influence each other. For example, changes in Earth's atmospheric composition (especially the concentrations of greenhouse gases) may alter the climate, while climate change itself can change the atmospheric composition (for example by changing the rate at which weathering removes CO2).

Maureen Raymo, William Ruddiman and others propose that the Tibetan and Colorado Plateaus are immense CO2"scrubbers" with a capacity to remove enough CO2 from the global atmosphere to be a significant causal factor of the 40 million year Cenozoic Cooling trend. They further claim that approximately half of their uplift (and CO2 "scrubbing" capacity) occurred in the past 10 million years.[40][41]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age

 

Geological and planetary dynamics work over long periods of time, hundreds of thousands and millions of years. Which is interesting but not really relevant to this discussion.

 

Simple physics says that atmospheric composition is the prime determinant of surface temperature, outside geological scale stuff or catastrophic vulcanization or meteor impact . There is simply no question about that. It isn't 'climate science' , it's just science, physics. Atmospheric CO2 is rising. The release of CO2 from burning fuels of all sorts the last 100 years has increased atmospheric CO2. Simple physics demands that this will raise global surface temps, absent other factors. So the climate is being impacted, warmed, by increased atmospheric CO2. Other factors may impact that and complex shorter term cycles may blunt or amplify the CO2 warming but to argue that fossil fuel use and release of CO2 is not effecting climate now is not in the realm of science or logic but ideology and politics. That isn't to say the other side is not political but their politics follows the science. For me I assume nothing will stop humans burning every source of carbon available, almost as quickly as possible, until there is none left. Political action is incapable of stopping that so warmer it will be.

 

* Which planet has the highest surface temperature? You probably guess Mercury being you know it is closest to the sun. Wrong. Venus is although it is twice as far from the sun and thus gets only 25% of the solar heat as Venus whose average surface temp is over 860F. Some of that heating is simply because of density as it is 92 times more dense than earths, ie. more pressure=higher temperature. However the atmosphere is mainly CO2. Trapping a gigantic proportion of all solar heat.

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