Climate change....man or nature? (snow, warm, global warming, temperatures)
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like the title says you think its natural or man made? If you say man made, can you tell me where the glaciers that use to cover the majority of the US went? I know there use to be a huge one right where new york is...
like the title says you think its natural or man made? If you say man made, can you tell me where the glaciers that use to cover the majority of the US went? I know there use to be a huge one right where new york is...
Some climate change can be caused by man is not the same as saying all climate change must have been man made.
Almost all climate change historically has been natural. The recent warming has been caused by both natural and man-made factors, I believe in roughly equal proportion. Other factors besides CO2 are obviously driving the climate as well - one look at the CO2 chart compared to the temperature chart demonstrates that. If I had to pick one or the other I'd say natural, since even global warming has to stop in the face of the PDO cycle (just look at the 1970's...), and the historical nature of all climate changes before 1900 or so.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, so there's no denying that greater concentrations of it in the atmosphere (which has resulted at least partly from anthropogenic emissions) will trap more heat. However, this says nothing of the magnitude of its global warming potential. Keep in mind it is a trace gas in the atmosphere. As far as I know, it has not been and cannot be empirically demonstrated how a certain magnitude of CO2 increase in the atmosphere will increase temperatures. So to say that global warming is partly anthropogenic and partly natural doesn't seem like it should be very controversial to me; the problem is, who knows just to what extend we may be to the blame. There are reasons a runaway greenhouse effect is plausible, such as warmer oceans holding less dissolved CO2; permafrost melting, leading to methane emissions; and reduced snow cover in winter, especially in the Northern Hemisphere, leading to massive warming locally due to lowered albedo; among others. But among the many positive feedback loops, there could be negative ones, as well as other unforeseen and unknown processes. Any way you look at it, how the earth responds to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is what makes all the difference, so in a way it is beyond our control and knowledge anyway. We cannot simply reduce CO2 emission and expect natural processes that we may have set in motion to just reverse themselves. And similarly, we shouldn't expect further emissions of CO2 to have the same effect as previous ones, as the global warming potential of CO2 decreases logarithmically with greater atmospheric concentrations, so that further emissions trap less heat than previous ones.
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