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Resolved Question: I may sound stupid but , what is global warming?
Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. Global surface temperature increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the last century.[1][A] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) concludes that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations resulting from human activity such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation are responsible for most of the observed temperature increase since the middle of the 20th century.[1] The IPCC also concludes that natural phenomena such as solar variation and volcanoes produced most of the warming from pre-industrial times to 1950 and had a small cooling effect afterward.[2][3] These basic conclusions have been endorsed by more than 40 scientific societies and academies of science,[B] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[4] moreResolved Question: English teachers- Would this earn a grade 1 for a solo talk in english? (Standard Grade)?
Is the content OK? And I don't know if you are allowed to help me with it, but do you know what I could could cut out?- because it is too long. Sorry- it is a lot to read but I would really appreciate some help! I have chosen to do my Solo Talk on Global Warming. I want to tell you what Global Warming is, how it is affecting our planet and what we can do about it. Global Warming is the increase in the Earth’s average temperature that causes changes in climate. The ‘greenhouse effect’ is a natural warming process. Heat energy radiated by the sun is caught in the Earth’s atmosphere, warming the planet. Greenhouse gases such as Carbon Dioxide and Methane, form a layer around Earth, absorbing and preventing heat from escaping. It is called ‘the greenhouse effect’ because it reflects how the air in a greenhouse heats up overtime and holds the heat in. Since the start of the industrial era, humans have been producing huge amounts of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide. This is mainly due to burning fossil fuels. We have become so reliant on fossil fuels that if we were to stopped using them, our economy would collapse. There would be barely any electricity, no petrol, and no hot water. The Kyoto Protocol, requires countries to cut their emissions by 5.2% for 2012 has been agreed to by 73% of countries, including the UK. Methods to help cut these emissions include looking for alternative power supplies such as tidal, solar, hydroelectric and wind power. Cars are a major source of greenhouse gases, so scientists are working hard to modify cars and have them running on hydrogen gas, which produces water instead of carbon dioxide. The governments has also made companies change their products such as hairspray so that it is less toxic to the environment. As well as putting many species in danger of extinction, cutting down trees, especially rain forests is bad for Global Warming, because plants absorb carbon dioxide. During the last 100 years, the world’s average temperature has increased by 0.7%. This may not sound a lot but this still has big effects on our planet. Ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, glaciers are retreating, there is more extreme weather and deserts are spreading. As well as this, animals and plants are suffering; they can not adapt quickly enough to rising temperatures, and this will lead to the extinction of many species. An example of this, are coral reefs which are extremely sensitive to their environment. In 1998, some areas saw a 70% loss in the corals, and there is expected to be more of this for the years to come. Another thing expected is for diseases such as malaria to spread to different areas as new regions of the world heat. How much you contribute to global warming is known as your carbon footprint. Every single person in here has a carbon footprint. Our carbon footprint increases whenever we do something which increases the amount of gases which contribute to Global Warming, such as switching on a TV, having a shower or toasting bread. It would be impossible to not contribute at all to Global Warming, but we can do lots of things to help. Switch off a light when you are leaving a room, stop charging your mobile when it is fully charged, try to be more efficient with paper and instead of putting the heating up when you are cold- put a jumper on. These are only a few of the things that you can do to help the environment, and every one of them does not just help the environment; it also helps whoever pays the bills. It takes 30 years before the climate change actually happens so the climate that we are experiencing today is actually caused by the actions of 1979. That means that we will only see the results of our actions today in 2039. We should take responsibility of our actions today because it will be our responsibility to clean it up, and after that our children, and then, our grandchildren. We cannot completely stop Global Warming, it is a natural thing that happens about every hundred thousand years. Many people think that it is silly to worry about Global Warming because it is a natural thing. I agree that it would have happened anyway no matter what our actions, but I also believe that humans have made it worse and there is lots of evidence supporting this. Reducing your carbon footprint might not do a lot, but if we all try to be more environmentally friendly then, together we can make a big difference and help to save our planet, Earth. Thanks for reading this! moreResolved Question: Global Warming - The other side of the argument.?
Believe global warming is primarily caused by natural processes Scientists in this section conclude that natural causes are likely more to blame than human activities for the observed rising temperatures. •Khabibullo Ismailovich Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovskaya Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the supervisor of the Astrometria project of the Russian section of the International Space Station: "Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy - almost throughout the last century - growth in its intensity...Ascribing 'greenhouse' effect properties to the Earth's atmosphere is not scientifically substantiated...Heated greenhouse gases, which become lighter as a result of expansion, ascend to the atmosphere only to give the absorbed heat away." (Russian News & Information Agency, Jan. 15, 2007 [9]) (See also [10], [11], [12]) •Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air." (Capitalism Magazine, August 22, 2002)[13] Baliunas and Soon wrote that "there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content." (Marshall Institute, March 25, 2003) [14] •David Bellamy, environmental campaigner, broadcaster and botanist: "Global warming is a largely natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed."[15] •Reid Bryson, emeritus professor of Meterorology: "It’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air." [16]. •Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: "The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown." (Telegraph, April 9, 2006 [17]) •George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California: "The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation ..., (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities ... . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible." (Environmental Geology, vol. 50 no. 6, August 2006 [18]) •Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: "That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation - which has a cooling effect. ... We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly... solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle." (The Hill Times, March 22, 2004 [19]) •William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential."[20]) "I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." [21]) "So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more."[22]) •Yuri Izrael, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "There is no proven link between human activity and global warming."[23] •Zbigniew Jaworowski, chair of the Scientific Council at the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw: "The atmospheric temperature variations do not follow the changes in the concentrations of CO2 ... climate change fluctuations comes ... from cosmic radiation." (21st Century Science & Technology, Winter 2003-2004, p. 52-65 [24]) •David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: "About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming." (May 15, 2006 [25]) •Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: "The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned." (M. Leroux, Global Warming - Myth or Reality?, 2005, p. 120 [26]) •Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: global warming "is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn’t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole"[27] •Tim Patterson [28], paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: "There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" [29] •Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology, The University of Adelaide: "We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate... It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it". [[30]] •Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities." (Environment News, 2001 [31]) •Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. ... [A]bout 2/3's (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes." His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries. [32] •Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: "The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect." (Christian Science Monitor, April 22, 2005) [33] "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it.", NCPA Study No. 279, Sep. 2005 [34]. “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.” (CBC's Denial machine @ 19:23 - Google Video Link) •Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]here's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed." (Harvard University Gazette, 24 April 2003 [35]) •Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London: "...the myth is starting to implode. ... Serious new research at The Max Planck Institute has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor..." (Global Warming as Myth [36]) •Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center: "Our team ... has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. ... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover." [37] •Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa: "At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model ..., and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. ... Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge." (In J. Veizer, "Celestial climate driver: a perspective from four billion years of the carbon cycle", Geoscience Canada, March, 2005. [38], [39]) [edit] Believe cause of global warming is unknown Scientists in this section conclude it is too early to ascribe any principal cause to the observed rising temperatures, man-made or natural. •Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks: "Thus, there is a possibility that only a fraction of the present warming trend may be attributed to the greenhouse effect resulting from human activities. This conclusion is contrary to the IPCC (2007) Report, which states that “most” of the present warming (+0.7°C/100 years) is due to the greenhouse effect."[40] •Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): "The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content." (Translation from the original French version in L'Express, May 10, 2006 [41]) •August H. "Augie" Auer Jr., retired New Zealand MetService Meteorologist, past professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming: "So if you multiply the total contribution 3.6 by the man-made portion of it, 3.2, you find out that the anthropogenic contribution of CO2 to the the global greenhouse effect is 0.117 percent, roughly 0.12 percent, that's like 12c in $100." "'It's miniscule ... it's nothing,'". [42] •Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and a professor of geography at Arizona State University: "[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 °C. ... At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." (George C. Marshall Institute, Policy Outlook, September 2003[43]) •Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: "There is evidence of global warming. ... But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done." (The New Zealand Herald, May 9, 2006 [44]) •David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: "The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause--human or natural--is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria." (Testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, December 6, 2006 [45]) •Richard Lindzen, Alfred Sloane Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But--and I cannot stress this enough--we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." [46] "[T]here has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas — albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in CO2 should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed." (San Francisco Examiner, July 12, 2006 [47] and in Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006, Page A14) •Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: "We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind." (George C. Marshall Institute Washington Roundtable on Science and Public Policy, April 17, 2006 [48]) Still convinced that this new religon is right? more
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