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ClimateChangeRe:Whew, no problem then (Score:5, Informative) > Most scientists agree that humans have contributed a small change to the climate, but all agree that the majority of the change is due to natural cycles (solar, long term atmospheric fluctuations etc). The only people claiming that humans are the sole or majority cause of climate warming/change are involved in politics, vote gathering, and selling 'technology' concepts to 'save the planet' in order to bilk the public out of money. I am a climate scientist. I've never been in politics and I've never sold anything (professional student here). I also think you're completely wrong. My experiences at the 2008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union are that most (9/10) of the scientists I met agree with the IPCC [www.ipcc.ch] report on abrupt climate change. But you've made an even more fundamental mistake. Science isn't democratic-- it's about evidence. Open up the IPCC reports yourself and focus on what's really important, instead of trying to count how many people are on each side. For example, Vostok ice core [climateactionnetwork.ca] data confirms that for nearly half a million years, the climate has changed cyclically. But in all that time, the maximum CO2 concentration never went above 300 ppm. (It's hit higher levels millions of years ago, but that was a slow and gradual change. Plus the Earth was essentially a different planet back then, with a different solar luminosity and biosphere so comparisons across that much time are tricky.) You're right to say that natural variations are evident in the data, but the most prominent cycles over geological time are governed by (among other effects) Milankovitch cycles [wikipedia.org] which are caused by periodic variations in the earth's orbit. But, CO2 concentrations are at 380 ppm today. That's a level it hasn't hit in the last half million years. If we're seeing natural variability alone, it's quite a coincidence that it occurs right when we started excavating fossil fuels to fuel a billion cars. Plus, the Vostok data is a little difficult to analyze in this manner, but it seems like at Vostok the CO2 always increased 600 years AFTER the temperature started to increase. At least, that's the way it used to work. Right now, the CO2 concentration is at an unprecedented level but the temperature is barely above normal. Again, that suggests that we're not facing natural climate change, we're dealing with anthropogenic abrupt climate change. |