QUOTE(weegee @ Nov 29 2009, 11:00 AM)
heres my claim.
say Co2 is the driver of the temperature, but how can it be when it has been happening repetitively throughout centuries and back then there were no factories to contribute that extra CO2? then some may say, what has been happening then is happening now, but why only now bring in internal combustion engines onto the table?
or it could be rightly explained the other way around, that the rise and fall of CO2 can be the product of temperature change. so nothing to be blamed.
as i see it, the story of cars and factories omitting CO2 is the cause of temperature rise is more dramatic to be sold. it seems as though we have the control over the nature, and preventing our dooms day is viable. so long as it sounds legit, people would buy it. money would be invested into the study of that aspect, in the false pretense of saving our world.
Ah right, we can finally discuss. Well the first thing we have to say is that it's true, the global mean temperature is a product of multiple causes, and yes, there have been periods in the past where the Earth has been warmer than today. It depends on the configuration of the continents - you can prevent a lot of warming at the poles from occuring if you can block warmer water closer to the Equator from flowing into the poles. There is also a natural variation in our climate, evidenced by past records of warm periods, followed by ice ages. But what's changed is CO2 levels have been much higher than at any time in the past 400,000 years or so, and there is no doubt that this is man's doing (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png). What's currently being disputed is to what level is CO2 contributing to the warming, on which I'm not an expert in, and cannot answer, but the general consensus (approx 90-95% of scientists in general, it seems) is that the main driver is CO2 emissions, unless another new driver for warming can be found, and can show that it's led to this recent warming. The sceptics have proposed plenty, and plenty of them have been shown to not be the main driver, relative to the CO2 emissions anyway.♦
But I'd like to bring up another side effect of CO2 production, which is often forgotten about: Ocean acidification. I hope we're agreed that CO2 emissions will lead to acidification of oceans (they've absorbed most of the CO2 we've produced actually), and there are many unknown consequences that might affect us all with that.
Side note: An argument I see often is that CO2 concentrations were higher during the time of the dinosaurs, and life flourished even more back then (tropical forests up to near the poles). True, but it's the rate of change we're worried about.
This post has been edited by bgeh: Nov 29 2009, 11:42 AM 
Nov 21 2009, 09:05 AM
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. It's proven that these fellas in the CRU are unprofessional, and have been influenced politically. It does not prove that all of AGW is a lie, because it is only one research group of of many firstly, and secondly, most of the emails are perfectly innocuous, with questionable words, when put into context sounds right. Though I'll admit 1-2 emails sound disturbing to me.
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