Climate Change: Real issue or giant scam?

We’ve had climate change before (look at the ice age). And it’s definitely changing now whether anyone likes it or not. Who’s to blame is up for debate. I’d say that some is natural, but some is due to human actions.

I thought we were over thIs already? It’s like asking if the grass is green. Climate change is measurable and not subject to anyone’s opinion, yours mine or Trump’s.

It’s not a “scam” but it’s likely not going to be an imminent catastrophy either. It’s also not exactly deserving of the blame it gets for seemingly anything and everything. The debate is not “over” either. 97% don’t actually agree. Big thing that is up in the air is if there are dampening or amplifying warming effects due to CO2 rise.

On a geological timescale, the climate has always gone through fluctuations in temperature, and ”[s]cientists have pieced together a record of Earth’s climate, dating back hundreds of thousands of years (and, in some cases, millions or hundreds of millions of years), by analyzing a number of indirect measures of climate such as ice cores, tree rings, glacier lengths, pollen remains, and ocean sediments, and by studying changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun.

“This record shows that the climate system varies naturally over a wide range of time scales. In general, climate changes prior to the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s can be explained by natural causes, such as changes in solar energy, volcanic eruptions, and natural changes in greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations.

“Recent climate changes, however, cannot be explained by natural causes alone. Research indicates that natural causes do not explain most observed warming, especially warming since the mid-20th century. Rather, it is extremely likely that human activities have been the dominant cause of that warming.”

https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/climate-change-science/causes-climate-change_.html
(The URL looks a little odd because it’s an archived section of the site).

While the Earth’s record does show climate shifts over the millennia, it also shows a strong correlation between levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and those climate shifts, and has allowed scientists to understand the relationship between the two (as well as other factors involved in the Earth’s climate).

We know that humans are causing the recent spike in greenhouse gases, especially CO2, and we know that the rate we’re doing so is causing a rapid change in the earth’s climate. Most global warming concerns involve how, how much, and how quickly we are affecting global climate change.

We’re at about 400ppm CO2 right now. The most recent comparison is the Pliocene era. This National Geographic News article gives a nice description of what the ppm measurements mean, and how scientists are trying to figure out how our current CO2 levels/climate will compare to previous ones. It’s worth reading through, I think. I guess the short and oversimplified answer is that the world looked a lot different than it does now.

Scam? Scam? How could you think that it is a scam? 97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is due to human activities. Just look at the graph that is the first thing one sees on this site. It is a stark truth and makes it very clear. There are a lot more facts clearly laid out on this web site from NASA.

OMG, are you REALLY still undecided?! Are you watching the increasingly rapid disappearing arctic ice at the pole?

The REAL scam are the lies climate change deniers continue to spread.

Bigly scam. Yuge scam. Human beings cannot alter or effect the planet at all. Nothing. People think we can? Sad.

I hope you are being sarcastic @Darth_Algar.

@chyna

Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Which do you think?

Climate change is real. How much of it is caused by humanity is moot, but man IS contributing to the problem so any and all attempts to halt or control man’s contributions are a good thing.

It’s a hoax invented by the Chinese.

So it seems a great many of you believe that climate change is a real issue that threatens the planet. So let me ask this provocative question: Why is it that the only thing the world leaders can come up with is to control carbon emissions? And to sign treaties concerning this? If you believe climate change is real then yes, limiting carbon emissions is a piece of it. But it is not the only action necessary to stop a dire catastrophe. How do we scrub carbon from the air? Plants do a great job. Yet has any world leader once come up with the idea of planting more plants in addition to limiting carbon emissions? How about protecting the existing forests and rain forests? Limiting carbon emissions is totally impossible since people and animals exhale CO2 all the time. In fact the average human exhales approximately 2.3 pounds of CO2 in a given day. 7.5B humans on earth….that adds up to 8,625,000 tons of CO2 in a day or 3.15B tons per year. So why hasn’t any world leader worked on scrubbing in addition to limiting?

An observed fact.

Climate change aside, we have got to find sources other than fossil fuels to power this world. We’re running out at an alarming rate.
I think this is what we should focus on. Once we find other sources, the other question will resolve itself.

To answer the question, it is absolutely real, and the current crisis is man made.

@seawulf575
The two most important things that can be done to combat climate change are the two things that people are generally most averse to being told not to do, and have next to no chance of being addressable through policy.

Climate change is real. Human actions attributing to rapid climate change is real. Scientist have come to a consensus that humans are attributing to climate change; the fringe not included.

WTF is so hard to understand? Also in recent news: gravity exists, immunizations DO NOT cause autism and water is wet.

Oh, and the earth is fucking round.

@Dutchess_III I agree with finding ways to get off our fossil fuel addiction. I don’t necessarily agree with the current opinion on climate change, but I do recognize that we live in a biosphere and have an impact on it just by being present. And burning fossil fuels does create a lot of poisons that I don’t like to have in my air. I would support funding for research and development of solar and wind power to make them actually efficient. I would rather see us support that as opposed to subsidizing the current inefficient technology.

The thing is I think people who resist “going green” because they think climate change BS would be more inclined to go green because running out off fossil fuels is tangible and obvious. We need to yell more about that to get more people with the program.
In the end, if we’ve found replacement energy and the climate keeps changing the can say they were right.
If not then we’ve saved the earth as we know it.

It’s a real and deadly-serious issue. It IS human caused. See this . There is no question, except created by people with greed-based agendas, and that only works on the corporate-TV-deluded public in the USA – there is no real debate in the rest of the world.

The only unknown is what exactly the extent and time frame for the consequences will be, but many of the possible theories include human extinction.

There are plenty of people who propose environmental protection, stopping deforestation, planting more trees and so on, in addition to reducing emissions as much as possible. Not enough of them are in power, especially in the USA. It seems to have a lot to do with foolish greed-based thinking and allowing money in politics, and the fact that the world economy has long been dominated by too few corporations and some ridiculously wealthy people who together have had the wealth and power games in the bag for a long time, but keep us distracted with other news stories. The real mystery to me is why such people think it makes sense to keep the world they own on a path to destruction. If I owned the planet, I’d definitely have a very green agenda for it.

@Zaku I think the answer to why people think it makes sense is because that way they don’t have to do anything, don’t have to change their life style or give up anything that is giving them instant gratification.

@Zaku That graph is interesting. So what do they say caused the last ice age? It couldn’t have been human activity- or the lack of it. It’s a good question to ask.

The good people of xkcd have an illustration for this. Looks pretty convincing to me.

@seawulf575 Hmm, but it seems to me like people with vast wealth and power don’t really stand to lose any life style or gratification perks, even if they rolled back the oil and lumber and industrial agriculture industries as much as possible. They’ve already got hundred of millions or several billions in wealth per household.

@snowberry That graph goes back to 1880AD. and covers 125 years. The main theory I know of about the cause of past ice ages mainly has to do with long-term periodic variations in the earth’s orbit and tilt relative to the sun, which affect the amount of solar energy coming into the polar regions. They take place on a time scale of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, not hundreds of years.

Here is a rather nice page, I think offering more detailed information and discussion on the subject.

The xkcd illustration that @Stinley just linked is a great visual representation of how out-of-scale the numbers are, though the part at 15,750BCE should be kept in mind – that is, most of the line is a dotted average because we don’t know the specific temperatures in great detail in the past, so we also don’t know the history or spikes. It’d be good to see such a chart for the entire period of animal life too, if there’s data for that, as it might show how hot it’s been without causing mass extinctions.

the debate is over as to whether or not things are getting warmer. That redoubt was breached years ago, and now “deniers” have fallen back to the 2nd line of defense – ” the climate is always changing” the implication being “we are not responsible and have nothing to do with it.”

Yes there is a huge difference between climate gradually changing over thousands of years due to orbital shift, or for whatever ER reason, and drastic climate change happening in the span of two human life times.