Global Warming - Are humans responsible?

By: citijour Category: Environment Date: Mar 12, 2007 Views: 1119 Comments: 7

For the last 20 years we have been told by the governments of the west and the environmentalists that the earth was warming up due to activities of the humans and that the ice in the northpole was melting and that the glaciers were shrinking.  However, recently there has been debate on whether humans have actually anything to do with global warming or have human activities significantly contributed to global warming?  Here are some facts that need to be studied comparitively.

Facts that suggest human activities are a major contributor to global warming:
1. The ten hottest years in recorded history (since the 1860's, when reliable measurements began) have all occurred after 1973.
2. Average annual temperatures have gradually been climbing.
3. The polar caps are melting, and giant cracks are appearing in their enormous ice shelves. An 800-square-mile ice shelf called the Wordie has disappeared from Antarctica. A gigantic iceberg the size of Rhode Island also broke off the Antarctic in January, 1995. If even a tenth of the ice in Antarctica melts, it would raise sea levels 12 to 30 feet around the world. (4)
4. Forests are climbing farther north into the polar region, thanks to warmer weather and receding glaciers. There has also been a proliferation of plant life in Antarctica.
5. Disease outbreaks have been increasing all over the world, due to the fact that diseases thrive better in hotter weather.
6. El Nino seems to be staying longer. (El Nino normally arrives every three years; it is an upwelling of warm water from the deep Pacific Ocean that rises up all along the Western American coast. It usually has a profound effect on weather.) For the last ten years, El Nino has been causing conditions from extreme drought to extreme rain on the West Coast.
7. Marine animals have been migrating to newer habitats. Creatures who normally live in warm water have been expanding their habitat, whereas creatures who live in cold water have been retreating farther north and south.

Facts that suggest humans are not responsible for Global warming
1. We do not know why the climate varies.  Global climate has fluctuated considerably over the earth's history. Many of the major climatic changes can be traced to changes in the earth's orbit around the sun, while others can be linked to specific events like impact of a comet or meteroite or breakup of supercontinents that led to large changes in the concentration of atmosphereic greenhouse gases.
2. The current warming trend is analoguous to the Medieval Warming Period (10th to 14th century) and since MWP was a natural even, the current warming is also likely caused by natural processes.
3. The earth's climate for past 2 million years has been characterized by ice ages lasting about 100,000 years punctuated by relatively short (10,000 to 20,000 years) of warm periods or interglacials.  The swing from glacial to interglacial is caused by changes in the earth's orbit around the sun.  In the 1970s the climate scientists were saying an ice age was imminent.  Now they say the earth is warming.  They don't know what they are talking about, and want to sensationalise the masses to keep the funding of their departments and reseach work on.
4. Scientists cannot prove that the current warming is NOT due to natural processes and therefore cannot claim with certainty that the warming is due to human interference.
5. A different set of science writers like Nigel Calder have claimed that the scientists have exaggerated the role of human induced CO2 in global warming. Calder says that the global temperature has not risen in the past 5 years and that the Antartic was getting colder in the recent years but these have not been told to the masses. 

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So, we have two different set of scientits and science writers who are issuing equally strong reasons in support and against the hypothesis that human activities is the biggest contributor to global warming.  We need to keep a watch on it certainly as we would definitely like to know about it, but at the same time we might not want the tax payers money to be spent lavishly on projects whose people don't know what they are talking about, while we have more problems on the ground like clean drinking water, health and education waiting for funding from the governments.