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Originally Posted by nero
I'm curious. How many of you have bought into the idea than humans are the LEADING cause of global warming ? Do you even believe the Earth is warming ?
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Everything I've read in the last decade shows that the average temperature is increasing, albeit slightly and not beyond the historical range. OTOH, the estimations for global temperature earlier than the 20th century are sketchy at best. Even going back a couple of hundred years, the data is heavly fragmented and largely inaccurate from records taken by man. We are talking about fractions of degrees, impossible to measure way back when. Using tree ring or ice layer thickness to estimate the summer of 492 BC seems like a waste of time, other than to say the temp goes through cycles.
I don't doubt man contributes to the amount of heat energy released into the atmosphere, and that the composition of the atmosphere is slightly different than it was decades ago, however the extent of our influence is vastly overrated, IMHO. The underlying motivator of liberalism (eco-liberalism in this case) is selfishness and self-centeredness.
WE have to be the ones causing global warming because
WE are the most important beings ever to swim, crawl, or walk on this rock. The other erroneous conclusion of this logic is that
WE are the only ones that can stop it. While counter-intuitive it is nonetheless obvious if you think about the militant greenies.
Some see the Earth as a rather fragile balance, an ecological knife-edge where any small perturbation will send the planet (and
US) into chaos which will ultimately lead to
OUR destruction.
History has shown however, that even after great cataclysms the Earth is a resilient old girl. Self-regulating as well.
As an aside, at first glance you would think volcanic eruptions, with their GW of heat energy and millions of tons of CO
2 released into the atmosphere would lead to global warming, but that would be wrong. One big eruption and our global warming worries are over
http://www.geology.sdsu.edu/how_volc...e_effects.html
BTW, I found this on the internet, which among his many gifts to the world was invented by Al Gore
.