What's the main cause for climate change?

I agree with your conclusions as do all serious scientists.

You know how when it’s a really hot day and your car has been in the sun for several hours? When you enter the car, you notice that it the internal temperature of the car is far hotter than the temperature outside the car. This is caused by the greenhouse effect, in which heat gets trapped and is unable to escape. This greenhouse effect is exactly what is causing climate change: heat, which would normally be reflected off into space, is trapped by greenhouse gasses such as CO2, and is thus unable to escape.

I and 98–99% of climate scientists agree.

Saying it’s like “natural cycles” is like arguing that, because your apartment gets cold in the winter and hot during the summer, burning a fire in your living room won’t make your apartment any hotter.

Climate change has been here for as long as Earth has been here. The sun’s cycles, changes to Earth’s ocean currents cause a rhythmic climate variation. The are also occasional natural events that approximate a nuclear winter due to massive clouds of dust being ejected into the upper atmosphere. Disasters such as large comet or asteroid strikes or eruptions of super-volcanoes can plunge the Earth into a sudden ice age.

That said, there is anthropogenic global warming going on today. We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas, trapping solar heat into the Earth’s atmosphere and causing warming. We know we are dumping far more CO2 into the atmosphere per year today than Earth’s natural processes can remove in a year. You sometimes see estimates of CO2’s atmospheric half-life, but those estimates are relative to levels being added, since once Earth’s absorption systems are maxed out, there is no more removal capacity. We are dumping 27 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere each year, or about 130 times as much as all Earth’s volcanoes contribute. But we’ve only recently started doing that and since the industrial revolution, CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have been steadily rising.

The CO2 levels were much higher in the distant past. Ocean levels were 350 feet higher than they are today. But do we want to teraform Earth to make it suitable for dinosaurs and to flood all the coastal regions of the planet up to the coastal mountains? I don’t think so. I agree with your conclusion that humans are causing atmospheric CO2 to rise with no end in sight, and that this isn’t a good idea.

Lol no comment I live in a small town full of scientists and a National Lab. Argueing about this and other theories is almost a contact sport : p I am a simple disabled mathmatition and biologist without a PHD but I will let you know who wins :) How to define winning though?

Well, welcome to Fluther, @deblee. Climate science debates can be a contact sport here too. Sit back and enjoy the flying fur.

Is the climate changing?

@Charles Always. We’re due to set a record high of 86 degrees F here in Boston for the Marathon. Pity the runners who haven;t trained to handle the heat.