The earth is warming about .05 degrees Celsius per decade and has warmed almost a full degree Celsius (or a total of about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1880 . A large consensus of scientists estimate the average global temperature will increase 0.3 to 1.7 °C (0.5 to 3.1 °F) by 2099. We can debate the amount of warming, but satellite data is pretty good.
It is a safe bet that SOME of the global warming is due to human activity. Test results have shown that human activity has caused local temperature increase, so we can only debate the amount of global warming that is due to human activity. Other causes of global warming are solar activity and geological and volcanic emissions. But here we will mainly discuss global warming due to human activity or our production of greenhouse gases.
Simply everyone believes natural global warming is somehow better than human-caused global warming. The discussion of climate change centers on blaming humanity and not on artificial methods of global cooling. Solutions proposed for global warming are necessarily highly contrived and unnatural. For example, if the problem is global warming there are ways to cloud out sunlight to cool off the world using water vapor or a shade devices on a large scale on the earth surface or in space. These are not common proposals, however.
Whatever the cause of global warming, and the blame, and possible solutions, the discussion mostly centers on human production of greenhouse gases. Most people recognize five greenhouse gases and the most common greenhouse gas is water vapor. Besides the possibility of unnaturally generating huge clouds of water vapor all over the earth to slow global warming there aren’t proposals concerning water vapor on a global scale.
Some people consider some synthetic gases produced only by humanity to be greenhouse gases. This appears more to be the argument of what is or is not natural, and not many believe removing or generating more of these gases is a solution to global warming. Regardless, the production of many of these gases has been dramatically slowed by environmental laws prohibiting their production
Although they are wrong, the overwhelming majority of those who advocate changing human behavior because of global warming make these assumptions:
1: Daily weather is changed by global warming.
2: Global warming and climate change are the same thing.
3: Colder than normal temperatures and extreme weather are related to global warming.
4: There are large groups of organized people who deny climate change.
5: If we all make small changes in our behavior such changes will mitigate global warming.
Predicting specific weather events is problematic, much less weekly or monthly trends. Computer models are pretty good at getting the weather three days in advance, but not much more. So even if our daily weather were changed by global warming there is no way to show what that change is.
Global warming is a fact, proved by using thermometers and mathematics. Climate change however is a difficult concept. Whose climate and what change? One can assert that warmer temperatures is a climate change itself but surely that is misleading. Temperature is only one aspect of climate.
If our temperature has changed because of global warming then the temperature is therefore warmer. To say that colder temperatures are brought to us by warming is a logical anomaly. By what process does a warmer temperature make a colder temperature? And it is not possible to have an informed opinion about whether or not extreme weather conditions have been brought by global warming without identifying the process or mechanism that brought the extreme weather. I know of no such process or mechanism.
There are crackpots and unthinking public figures who make silly and outright stupid off-hand remarks daily. There are others who try to shock and still others who think illogically. Many do all three. But I know of no effort anywhere to hide the facts surrounding global warming. There does seem to be a concerted effort, however, to make those who want to see those facts and understand the issues for themselves look foolish. Citations available on request.
But the largest misconception we all face about global warming is that our individual actions may change the climate. This is the issue at hand, and the complicated reasoning that makes nearly all of us misunderstand are the ideas that we will consider, beginning with the biggest of all:
Human generated carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas
Most of the efforts to mitigate climate change and global warming are aimed at reducing carbon emissions. We understand that burning fuels adds carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It does not matter if the fuel is fossilized like coal or oil or recently grown like ethanol from corn. There is a finite amount of carbon and the theory appears to be that the carbon is better buried under the ground than in the atmosphere.
We are told that trees take in carbon dioxide, which is true. And when we burn those trees they give us back the carbon dioxide. The most efficient way to keep the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere would be to bury the old growth (new growth takes more carbon from the atmosphere than old growth).
Any place that sequesters or removes carbon from the atmosphere is called a Carbon Sink. Nearly 40% of all the carbon dioxide that is removed from the atmosphere is stored in the oceans, which makes the oceans the largest carbon sink on earth. The . This is causing Ocean Acidification and is thought to soon be responsible for the bleaching of coral reefs and causing repressing the metabolism of jumbo squid and increasing the growth rate of seat star and shell plankton.
The other major carbon sink is underground as we said above. Also when we remove trees to make lumber for construction we have removed or sequestered that carbon from the cycle.
