Global warming!
 

Alright this is a topic that people argue with me about all the time. I've heard the evidence on both sides, and frankly I've decided not to care, but I would love to see honest debate about the subject, with my peers.

Rules:
1. No flaming. I don't care how annoyed you get with someone. Suck it up. Make a valid argument, or keep quiet. :-x

2. If the person above you said exactly what you're going to say, then don't. Wait a bit. I don't want to watch people just constantly agree with each other, I want to see debate. :stare:

3. Make arguments, and actually back them please. I don't want any of this "you're wrong because scientists said." cite them please. I want to know which scientist you're talking about. I wanna see links, I wanna see quotes. I want a real honest to God debate here. :feesh:



Questions to get you started: :?:

Is global warming happening?

If it is happening is it the fault of mankind?

Regardless of what's causing it, is it a bad thing? Why or why not?


GO! :illgetu:

In actuality I agree with you.

Besides all of that we just came out of a sort of mini Ice age, which followed the medieval warm period. So warming was natural.

However Might humanity have accelerated or exacerbated the warming?

People say natural as if it means magical. Warming and cooling cycles do not happen because they just happen, they happen because something causes them to happen and the sceptic community has yet to provide evidence of what this mysterious mechanism. To me man made climate change is a reality, it is only logically to assume a significant increase of greenhouse gases will cause an exacerbated greenhouse effect.
Anywhoo if you don't believe in it I'm not going to get preachy or try and disprove you because nothing is ever conclusive. But what I would urge you to do is watch the video below, it's not trying to prove global warming but how to deal with it-

to counter your video.

YouTube - lindybeige's Channel

YouTube - lindybeige's Channel

YouTube - lindybeige's Channel

There are lots more if you want to look, but this guy makes good enough points.

Counter? The video isn't trying to prove or disprove global warming as stated originally by myself and the contents within the video. My video basically says that there is two realities, either global warming exists or it doesn't. Your friend Lloyd could be wrong, just as I could be wrong. But and here is the deal breaker, if you listen to me and I'm wrong the worse case scenario would be an economic depression. If you listen to Lloyd and he's wrong it's the end of the world- and honestly I find it unnerving that he focuses on sea ice in the Arctic rather than addressing what scientists are really concerned about which is the ice caps, (ice on land) in the Antarctica melting- and it is, check out NASA or the British Antarctic Survey on the loss of ice shelves in the Antarctic Peninsula.

Except that every time the world has warmed in the past, and it has warmed in the past to much higher temperatures than we will get this time, it's been great for life in general. Populations boom, biodiversity increases massively, etc. So why would we need to do anything about it at all? Why are we so arrogant to assume that something like this is bad, just because it's different?

A third of the world's population lives near the coast line. Rising sea levels would at best make these areas vulnerable to flooding and at worst leave the land under water. Bangladesh is one of the most poorest and densely populated countries in the world and is at risk of loosing a significant amount of land to rising sea levels, which would cause approximately 10-30 million people to be displaced. It is estimated that the countries that will be effected the most by climate change will be the developing countries who do not have the funds and resources to prepare itself or to deal with the adverse effects.
Global warming is far more complex then the planet getting a little bit warmer. You may not be in a place where you feel you are effected by climate change but there are other places in the world, primarily Asia where the effects are being felt. The Tibetan Plateau supplies fresh water to rivers that feed 2 billion people and it is disappearing. The lost of a drinking supply is bad enough but the lost of ice also has another effect. The evaporation causes positive feedback which feeds tropical cyclone systems resulting in more violent weather patterns. Cyclone Aila in 2009 killed 325 people, 8000 people are still missing and nearly a million people have lost their homes- this sort of weather pattern is not constructive by any stretch of the imagination.
Biodiversity and whole ecosystems are being threatened by extinction, even your friend Lloyd sent his commiserations to the polar bear who is now facing extinction. Animal protection organizations such as the WWF are trying to raise awareness of how vulnerable ecosystems are.
Finally our way of life now is not the same as our ancestors. Mass deforestation, drilling for oil, globalisation and general raping of the worlds resources is recent in the time line of humanity and the world. This way of living is poisoning the world, even if it doesn't effect climate change, it still destroys whole habitats and pollutes the environment. BP did a stellar job screwing things up in the gulf of Mexico, while Texaco created all sorts of pollution and problems in Ecuador. I rather support a greener way of living then the above.

There are so many things wrong with what you just said that it makes my face hurt.

The polar bear is not going extinct. They're interbreeding with grizzlies, which produces a completely new species which is larger, stronger, and a better hunter. ...Not a bad fate I think.

As for people having to move... Oh no! the world will catch fire! ...oh wait, no it won't, they'll move, very slowly as they always have, and everything will be fine, because more of the earth will be able to produce food due to the higher humidity, temperatures and plant growth rate.

And the "general raping of the world's resources" is due to the fact that stupid people are in control of them. 90% of the wood and paper used in the U.S. comes from tree farms. We don't actually cut down forests anymore. The people in south America do, because they're generally uneducated, and don't know what they're doing.

Oil drilling... really? do you know anything about how pollution works? because an oil spill is minor at best. Oil is easily and quickly biodegraded, after it's dispersed. The only problem is when animals get stuck in it. The spill was basically gone after the storm hit it, and now it's not a problem.

To top it off, your argument is not based in science at all. You have no evidence to back anything up, and do you know why? there is none. Not a shred. I've looked. There are theories and bad experiments, and a bunch of data taken from the worst possible places. That's it.

Thing is eventually we will move to more efficient ways of generating power and goods, just because it's easier, and cheaper to. That's how economics works. It's social evolution, which must happen at its own pace. Do you know why we stopped killing whales? Gasoline was cheaper. It had nothing to do with people caring about whales.

It's okay.

And the interbreeding is causing the remixing of traits which make a much larger stronger bear, similar to the prehistoric short faced bear. :) I find it all terribly interesting.

And actually the real population control is gonna come when an emp wipes out all the technology and only people like me who can make shelter, and tools out of rocks and plants will have an edge. lol.

Electro-magnetic pulse. They make electronics not work. lol. All of you people who can't live without computers, will be in trouble.

don't worry about it. They're extremely rare in the natural world. Only real threat from one is if someone detonates a nuke high in the atmosphere. Won't happen.

Ah. Shiny. :) Another nature lover.

Or if the sun decides to screw with us with another solar storm. :lol: Fox news covered the solar storm from last month. Due to the fact that it isn't entirely relevant to the potential, I quoted it.
Also, a pyroclastic eruption like the one in 1815 can pump more CO2 and SO2 into the atmosphere at once than humans do in a year, not to mention the fact that cows produce more greenhouse gases than humans as well.
Cows :3
*Unfortunately, the only articles I can find about eruptions are general. :\*

Okay, that was mature...

Out of the entire polar bear population there have only been three cases of this particular hybrid. I don't that is enough to qualify this as a new normal mating pattern amongst polar bears. In fact there is only a brief window of time where polar bear and grizzly bear mating seasons overlap. Even so this new hybrid might not be viable future for the polar bears. Hybrids often have problems with mating, due to indistinct mating behaviour and patterns. In fact population hybrids are pretty rare due such complications.
You'll also be disappointed to know that despite this revelation, polar bears are still consider by International Union for Conservation of Nature as a vulnerable species.



Environmental migration is happening right now. This isn't some hypothetical fairytale where the coastal inhabitants will happily/slowly move further inland and live happily ever after. In 2005 half million islanders were displaced in Bangladesh when half of Bhola Island was lost to permanent flooding. There was no infrastruture set up to deal with 500,000 people losing their homes. People can not move into homes that do not exist nor can they move into existing homes that they cannot afford. So many islanders ended relocating into the slums of the inland city of Dhaka where poverty and disease are rife.
The social, economic, and health implications of displacement are vast and it is almost utter whimsy to presume that loosing entire towns and cities to coastal flooding is no big deal, people can just move and everything will be fine.



Stupid people don't accumulative the world's resources. Massive companies extract resources and manufacture them into products- and guess who buys these products? The consumer! Where there is demand there is a market. People are not motivated by stupidity they are motivated by profit. To them destruction and death that is caused by the extraction of resources is nothing more than collateral damage.

Several thousands animals died but some how this was okay because the oil dispersed quickly? Firstly how quick the oil disappears depends on several factors, secondly how much damage is done depends on where and how much oil is spilled. You can always to refer to ESI maps to see where the most vulnerable areas and environments are.

Well science is a methodology and seeing that climate change is not some atom, bacteria, virus or higgs boson that we can isolate and identify then the use of science is virtually defunct at proving with absolute conclusiveness that climate change is real. Science can't prove half the physics models we use, science can't prove the gravitational pull that keeps our feet on the ground. We can only speculate through the observed effects that we witness on earth, hence why climate change is a theory, quantum physics is a theory, evolution is a theory ect. Even so science excepts its limitations and does not seek to establish some kind of hellish null hypotheses where if it can not be proved science rejects it. All across the world scientists are gathering evidence for climate change and other scientists peer review their findings ect. There is evidence for climate change, but you don't believe this evidence is caused by climate change so for example the Antarctic peninsula is melting because...um..er.. I don't know somebody poured a cup of tea over it.


People have ethics and values that influence the market all the time, whether it be organic fruit, to free range eggs, to fair trade cotton. I don't want to buying electricity or fuel that I know harms the environment and companies know that hence why fuel companies are looking into ways of creating renewable biofuel. Capitalism isn't as Victorian as it once was. Child labour, sweat shops, ect create cheap products by the masses but many companies avoid using these methods because they fear the damage it would do between the consumer and brand.

...Serious question here, what grade are you in? I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just asking. Your understanding of what science is, and what it means is limited I think. All of those "theories" are accepted because there is acceptable evidence, which was collected in an acceptable manner. The "evidence" for global warming is sketchy. The experiments are badly done in many cases, and the data is being collected in bad locations.

In this case, you completely ignored what I said, and just repeated propaganda which you probably got from the widely debunked "story of stuff" videos.

We do not destroy hardly anything anymore, because it's simply not profitable to do so. We are looking into alternative energy, not because environmentalists whined about it, but because it will be cheaper and more efficient.

You haven't done research. You've just let the talking heads on the flashing box in your living room fill your brain with garbage. Look stuff up. Do research. Take actual science classes, please. I'm begging you. Actually get informed, because no one bothers to anymore, and it's not good.

Yeah you are trying to insult me but I'm not going to acknowledge it, if this is your debating style then whatever that's your problem and not mine.
Anyway putting aside the unpleasantness I will try and explain as best I can about science being a methodology. Epistemology is about the nature of knowledge and how we acquire it. Science is a form of epistemology, it is a methodology based upon empiricism. Through scientific methodology we gather knowledge. Epistemology recognizes that knowledge sometimes does not reflect truth so for example it was widely believed hundreds of years ago that the earth was flat. Knowledge changes likewise scientific models change. For along time medicine used the Hippocratic medicine model which said that disease and illness was cause by an imbalance of the four humours: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. As time progressed the knowledge about the human body and diseases changed and Hippocratic medicine became obsolete.
Dissecting animals or studying structures under a microscope is one way of acquiring knowledge but what happens when we try to study a subject that has no physical symptoms to study? This is when scientists formulate theories. We can not study gravity, we can only study the objects that is effected by gravity. If Newton's theory of gravity was universally accepted truth then there wouldn't be umpteen other theories about gravity (Alternatives to general relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).
Evidence for a theory does not nessarily prove a theory, it only gives it more credibility. For example creation theory versus big bang theory, one has more evidence than the other but neither have been proven, it's just one is more credible than the other.
Finally 'bad data', 'bad experiments' is a little woolly. The way research is proposed, executed, delivered and reviewed is always under intense scrutiny by academic peers, the universities that fund the research, ethic boards ect.
Which pieces of research are you exactly referring to anyway? Maybe you could be so kind to give me your own brief peer review analyses to explain what part of the research you did not exactly approve of?


All you've said is that all climate change research has been debunked because of 'bad data' and 'bad experiments' in the 'wrong location'. That's a tad ambiguous for me to believe. If this research was as 'widely debunked' as you claimed then international governments and bodies such as the World Health Organization and the United nations would not be endorsing campaigns to cut CO2 emissions.

There are many human activities that are destructive, like the deforestation of the Amazon- and no they are not chopping down trees for wood, they are chopping down trees for land to farm in Argentina. General urbanization is another example which is happening everywhere, building on green field sites or even in the green belt. In fact everything that has ever been made came from some sort of raw material, whether it be wood, plastic, glass ect. If you want a wooden chair then a tree has to be cut down ect.

Finally to reiterate my point about the relationship between consumer and brand BEHOLD the loving green whale that represents the attempts of the oil giants to pacify our concerns about their commitment to the environment.

Environment - Environment & Society
Environment | BP
Climate Change | Global Issues | Chevron
Managing climate change risks


No, I just haven't listened to Floyd.

You let Floyd into you head. Floyd didn't tell you about the south pole ice cap, or the people in Bangladesh, or about the polar bears. Floyd lied to you :(

I did, about Bangladesh, the south pole and polar bears lulz.


Like about Bangladesh, south pole, polar bears....

Can you tell I'm not taking this seriously any more, come on dude, you thought models of science couldn't be modified.

You know if you had been nice I would have been so much more gracious.

Well seeing you started flaming at me thus breaking your own thread rules, lets lower the tone of the thread with a picture that sums up my feelings at the moment-

EDIT: My feelings about the insults, not the quality or lack of about the argument... I kid I kid!

http://i252.photobucket.com/albums/h...nted-bongo.jpg

A. They have been gathering temperature data from right next to growing cities and ports. The temperature goes up here, because there are more people and machines every year, therefore more sources of heat.

B. The south pole has been gaining Ice for ten years. The northern Ice cap is the one that's shrinking, and either way this is mute because the ice caps haven't existed for most of earth's history.

C. I know how supply and demand works. Again! Most of the wood and paper used in the U.S. Comes from TREE FARMS! not forests. The trees being cut in South America are being cut by their people, not ours. We don't generally buy the wood.

D. Where is the proof that global warming is caused by humans? I ask because people like to blame it on CO2 which is still less than 3% of the atmosphere, and BTW the rise in CO2 has been proven by YOUR SIDE to follow the rise in temperature not precede it. In a universe where Cause precedes effect, it is impossible for the CO2 to be the cause of the rise in temperature.

YouTube - Evidence CO2 does not cause dangerous Global warming


E. Why is any of this bad anyway? Why do you assume that it's a bad thing for the world to get warmer? Again, I'll say this. When the world gets warmer life explodes. There's a general boom in biodiversity, and animal population, as well as expansion of forest regions. Deserts become grasslands, grasslands become forests, and forests become jungles. It sounds pretty good to me.

YouTube - Unstoppable Solar Cycles

Look at history and ancient history. Warmer climates are never bad. Not ever.

Who are they? Secondly did it never occur to you that meteorology departments world wide record weather patterns and changes everywhere. I have a little app on my desk top that tells me exactly what the weather is like local to me. Equally some one in rural France, or in a mountain range in the alps, or some guy in a research facility in the Antarctica can freely check out what the weather is going to be like in their local area. No one needs to gather temperature data because the met offices record it for them. Thirdly no one is disputing that climate change is not happening. It is happening we know that, even the sceptics know that. What is being disputed is if this climate change is being caused by man or whether this is a natural phenomena.

I've already said that it is the ice cap that we are concerned about NOT the sea ice. Antarctica is gaining sea ice which does not change the volume of water however the melting of the ice cap will increase sea volume because it is ice on land. Secondly it is not a moot point, look at the geology and geography of the world, there were times where deserts were once tropical seas and parts of the world was not submerged underwater. Our landscape has not remained consistent throughout the passage of the time. The risk of coastal flooding and loosing coast line is a real threat.

We're not talking about paper. Everything that is man made comes from a raw material whether it be the crude oil by products that make plastic or wood that comes from 'tree farms'. Some methods are more sustainable than others but seriously you can't assume that because tree farms exist therefore all extraction of raw materials is some how eco-friendly, that is a huge fallacy. Secondly I've already said that the biggest cause of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest is not wood. It is agriculture. People deforest the land to grow crops or farm animals, Argentina has a large beef market. Thirdly business is global, don't for one moment assume that because 'my country' does not cut down that country's trees 'we' are not accountable. You can not discount foreign investment or exports and in the example I just used it's not uncommon in the Argentinian beef for US farms to invest money in cattle farms in Argentina.

You should read the comments of your source because it would have revealed that the guy misused graphs and based his presentation on a piece work that is not recognised as a credible peer reviewed research. Plus the journal that published it admitted it was dodgy piece of work and was published to inspire debate amongst it readers and was a regrettable mistake. That aside which global warming theory are you wanting evidence for because there are more than one.



I don't know ask the 500,000 people in Bangladesh who have lost their homes. I've already explained about displacement. If coastal areas are flooded then a lot of people are not going to very happy about losing their homes. Secondly global warming over a period of time allows for adaption, rapid global warming could potentially be disastrous leading to drought and even desertification. This idea that the climate is going to be pleasantly warm is really short sighted. The world weather patterns work on feedback loops and scientists have already suggested that warmer temperature resulting in the cooling of Arctic sea ice may have interfered with weather feed back creating a harsher winter in 2005/2006- A link between reduced Barents-Kara sea ice and cold winter extremes over northern continents - OceanRep .

I'm worried because I've read the theories and I've read the literature- actual peer reviewed journals not joe blogs off youtube. The reality of the world getting warmer and exploding into life and everyone being happy is a nice one. I prefer your theory in terms of outcome to my own, but I know that the research and literature and even the general consensus amongst the scientific community is against your theory that it isn't happening.

p.s thanks for being nice this time :heart:

The polar bear in the strictest sense is going extinct. Interbreeding with another kind of bear, essentially creates a new subspecies.

Global warming does exist, however it is more accurately called "climate change."
Now, some in our fault, and some is just the earth's natural cycle (not exactly the most professional source, but it explains the theory I want to reference very well).
The natural cycle bit while interesting and "natural" is also kindof dangerous for us humans. When it gets too hot we can't live, when the waters rise, any coastal settlements, flood. The increased water surface, causes an additional rise in temperature.
Deserts become forests. forests become deserts, and new forests take hundreds of years to start growing again, if they do at all and in the process: killing off many kinds of plants and animals in the process because they are unable to adapt. Even in ice ages and in warmer ages, many species die and while this is natural to a degree, excess change, or change that happens too quickly an be catastrophic to all living things. Evolution takes many many years, and if the animals and plants can't adapt in time, they're fucked.

And then the rest is more directly our fault.
The rest meaning; increased CO2/other greenhouse gas levels from cattle farming, fuel burning, general overconsumption & waste creation, destroying the forests that turn CO2 onto oxygen*, ect all of which will hurt the oceans' ecosystems**, melting ice/snow (which has a high albedo, especially compared to the low albedo of the oceans.) Other effects. Possible future effects.

May I also suggest this light reading for skeptics?

Basically, even if it's not our fault, and it's going to happen anyway, why should we "poke the bear" so to speak? Science has in fact shown that greenhouse gases make the earth hotter by retaining heat. Even if you don't believe in global warming or climate change and insist that it's natural, do the natural thing: Go green!

Monstahh: Why thank you fort actually citing things and making a proper argument. :)

Personally I think that what we know as "Global Warming" doesn't exist. Now hear me out on this one. It's not a "global warming is a myth to scare us back to the dark ages" But more of Global "WARMING" isn't happening. What we are experiencing is a "Global Climate Change". The United State's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Defines Climate Change as http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/dow...ate_Basics.pdf
With this definition in mind we are able to better understand why Global Warming isn't what we are currently facing. True the rate at which the ice caps and glaciers are melting is faster than ever recorded previously, there are portions of the world that are facing periods of cooler temperature than normal . As seen with the map on the link provided, C3: NASA Global Warming Research: Last Decade of Data Shows Vast Areas of World Not Warming , we can see that most of what we assume to be warming is not in fact experiencing warming than usual temperatures. I will point out, however, that I don't think that this is an accurate model shown on the website as it is currently outdated, but it shows the general idea. The thing with Climate Change is that we're going to see different weather patterns and more frequent storms. Places that usually get rain will experience droughts and visaversa. This will mostly affect the El-Nino and La-Nina effects in the Pacific ocean, but there could be many other unforeseen effects.
As for if it is our doing, yes and no. It is part of a cyclical phenomenon that naturally occurs on the Earth, however the rate at which it is going through the changes, is unprecedented and can be correlated to our living and changing of the Earth to benefit us better. So yes we have accelerated the cycle and possibly have pushed the limits, but this is all part of what naturally has occurred.
I don't think that there is anything we can do to FIX this. There is no fixing Climate Change, just finding ways to mitigate the effects that we face.

I'm just going to say, we all know that CO2 emmissions into the atmosphere are definitely not helping our situation, and we know that the magnetic poles are moving which could definitely be part of our change in weather trends. There's definitely something wacky going on an d I think(I'min just too lazy to site so I'm not really trying to debate) its a combination of man made pollution and natural cycles of the earth-- and of course I have this personal belief about the whole 2012 thing that it could very well be the end of the world if the planet Nibiru comes within close proximity of the earth...(Planet X which Nasa referred to it as, funny that they don't mention it much anymore hmmm....)