Quote:
Originally Posted by evanny
in my point of view it is simple. climate changes and that is it. it always has and always will. it just that people starting to notice it more so they get scared since - well it is a change and who knows what will happen with their beautiful lawns. personally i don't care since nature is nature and it will do as it please. and to think after all that has happened to this planet - pole shifts, asteroids, ice ages, plate tectonics and world wide fires - we, humans, are going to put this blue-green ball in danger? we can launch all of our nukes and it won't even scratch the surface of the planet and after some 30 000 years when radiation is gone everything will be back to normal and life will go on.
only question is will we stay.
i also red an interesting article. it said that cars and the rest of man-made greenhouse gasses are nothing next to a simple volcano eruption a week long which throws in the atmosphere more sulphur and aids warming the same way humans do in 20 years.
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You obviously missed the bit about mankind producing 135 times the amount of CO2 than from volcanoes in 2010. I also posted a scientific paper that clearly shows that mankind on average produces far more CO2 than volcanoes do.
Sulphur actually helps to cool the atmosphere not warm it as long as it is ejected up high into the stratosphere. It forms sulphur aerosols which reflect more sunlight causing cooling in the troposphere. It's only the really big eruptions that do this though. Pinatubo was a good example of this occurring. Injecting sulphur aerosols ourselves into the stratosphere is actually one of the main ideas out there to attempt to rein in the warming.
I don't know where you read that crap evanny but believe me it is utter crap or you just didn't really understand what you were reading.
Yes the climate has always changed and always will. The mechanisms for natural climate change are now pretty well known. As I said previously, most of the natural factors suggest we should currently be cooling but we are not. This is some of the best evidence of how big a role greenhouse gases like CO2 play in our climate and the fact that we have been artificially raising their concentrations in our atmosphere is not something that there is any real debate on. We also know that the earth has been far hotter and far cooler than it is currently. We have pretty good ideas as to why as well. The fact that the climate has varied so much in the past quite naturally shows us clearly that it is very susceptible to subtle changes. And the changes in the level of CO2 in our atmosphere since industrialisation haven't been all that subtle. The big fear is if we artificially raise the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enough we'll reach a sort of tipping point where we'll have runaway greenhouse effect (it's happened before) that will entirely melt the ice in Antarctica and Greenland.
If this occurs in a reasonably rapid timeframe (say within the next few hundred years) it will have catastrophic effects. Most of the worlds major cities will be under water. Massive regions where billions of people currently live will also be inundated (much of the worlds' population lives close to the ocean). Regions that are major agricultural areas may become deserts or too wet. Such upheaval on a global scale would almost certainly lead to wars and incredible hardship and global economic crisis.
Anyway as I've said most people have little to no understanding of even the most basic concepts of science. We've seen plenty of that on this forum already. And human kind as far as I'm concerned is primarily motivated by greed. So I have little hope at all that anything will be done that will avert a rapid warming of the planet. Maybe our only hope will be science and technology coming up with some viable solutions. Because I can't see nations changing anything they currently do that would overly affect peoples lifestyles and threaten the viability of some of the biggest companies on the planet.
'Nature is nature and it will do as it pleases'. Yep nature will do what it does and life on planet earth will likely survive anything we could possibly do to it. Thing is do we care about the lives of future generations or not? Or are we just concerned with our own selfish wants and desires now? I suspect the later for most people.