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Originally Posted by sburns2421
The original topic of this thread was not if the Earth is warming, or if humans contributed. The question is whether humans are the LEADING cause (and therefore could lead the cure as well).
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Is the straw that broke the camels back the leading cause for broken camel backs?
Scientifically it is very doable that we can slow(if not stop) global warming if we take action now, the longer we wait, the more extreme the change is going to have to be.
Here is a link to show a scientific analysis on how much humans are contributing to global warming.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=87
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Over the last 150 years, carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have risen from 280 to nearly 380 parts per million (ppm). The fact that this is due virtually entirely to human activities is so well established that one rarely sees it questioned. Yet it is quite reasonable to ask how we know this.
One way that we know that human activities are responsible for the increased CO2 is simply by looking at historical records of human activities. Since the industrial revolution, we have been burning fossil fuels and clearing and burning forested land at an unprecedented rate, and these processes convert organic carbon into CO2. Careful accounting of the amount of fossil fuel that has been extracted and combusted, and how much land clearing has occurred, shows that we have produced far more CO2 than now remains in the atmosphere. The roughly 500 billion metric tons of carbon we have produced is enough to have raised the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to nearly 500 ppm. The concentrations have not reached that level because the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere have the capacity to absorb some of the CO2 we produce.* However, it is the fact that we produce CO2 faster than the ocean and biosphere can absorb it that explains the observed increase.
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