Is global warming human created?

[jaylach]

Will life on earth eventually cease
This song brings back memories as it foresees the future. Song is from 1969–53 years ago

One of my all time favorite songs. Talk about a one hit wonder...

 

[TwoTankAmin]

Most of what I read in this thread is pure garnage. There is science. You cannot argue with a quality thermometer and it has no political bias. The temperature is what it is. And the same goes for a lot of the rest of it.

Mankinds presence on the earth is relatively short.

Anatomical modernity. Bones of primitive Homo sapiens first appear 300,000 years ago in Africa, with brains as large or larger than ours. They're followed by anatomically modern Homo sapiens at least 200,000 years ago, and brain shape became essentially modern by at least 100,000 years ago

But the earth has been here for a bit longer then we have. the planet is 4.543 billion years old give or take a few million.

Most of what the planet and eventually any form of life on it came into being, died and was replaced, the planet could not support any form of life for most of its existence. And when it did it was almost totally wiped out several times. And none of this involved humans.

But lets talk about the Sun and if it is warming the planet rather than something else.

So what about Mars?

The planet Mars has a very thin atmosphere, nearly all carbon dioxide. Because of the low atmospheric pressure, and with little to no methane or water vapor to reinforce the weak greenhouse effect, Mars has a largely frozen surface that shows no evidence of life.

Compare that to lets say

The atmosphere of Venus, like Mars, is nearly all carbon dioxide. But Venus has about 154,000 times as much carbon dioxide in its atmosphere as Earth (and about 19,000 times as much as Mars does), producing a runaway greenhouse effect and a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead.

And then there is this

But several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the Sun:

• Since 1750, the average amount of energy coming from the Sun either remained constant or increased slightly.

• If the warming were caused by a more active Sun, then scientists would expect to see warmer temperatures in all layers of the atmosphere. Instead, they have observed a cooling in the upper atmosphere, and a warming at the surface and in the lower parts of the atmosphere. That's because greenhouse gases are trapping heat in the lower atmosphere.

• Climate models that include solar irradiance changes can’t reproduce the observed temperature trend over the past century or more without including a rise in greenhouse gases

Here is one last question. How do we know anything about the history of the planet that is morr than 300,000 years in the past. How do we know that man was not on the plantet 4.5 billion years ago? How do we mange to fly planes, drive cars etc etc if not for science?

Here are a few words of wisdom from Neil Degrasse Tyson:

“The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”

“When scientifically investigating the natural world, the only thing worse than a blind believer is a seeing denier.”

“The very nature of science is discoveries, and the best of those discoveries are the ones you don’t expect.”

“Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow.”

 

[itiwhetu]

Most of what I read in this thread is pure garnage. There is science. You cannot argue with a quality thermometer and it has no political bias. The temperature is what it is. And the same goes for a lot of the rest of it.

Mankinds presence on the earth is relatively short.

But the earth has been here for a bit longer then we have. the planet is 4.543 billion years old give or take a few million.

Most of what the planet and eventually any form of life on it came into being, died and was replaced, the planet could not support any form of life for most of its existence. And when it did it was almost totally wiped out several times. And none of this involved humans.

But lets talk about the Sun and if it is warming the planet rather than something else.

View attachment 161939
So what about Mars?

Compare that to lets say


And then there is this



Here is one last question. How do we know anything about the history of the planet that is morr than 300,000 years in the past. How do we know that man was not on the plantet 4.5 billion years ago? How do we mange to fly planes, drive cars etc etc if not for science?

Here are a few words of wisdom from Neil Degrasse Tyson:

You say the world is
" But the earth has been here for a bit longer than we have. the planet is 4.543 billion years old give or take a few million."
Not exactly accurate, I would say it is a bit of a shame if we are around in the "give or take millions of years". It means that the next group of so-called intelligent life may not know that we ever existed. I wonder what we are missing in all that science.

 

[jaylach]

You say the world is
" But the earth has been here for a bit longer than we have. the planet is 4.543 billion years old give or take a few million."
Not exactly accurate, I would say it is a bit of a shame if we are around in the "give or take millions of years". It means that the next group of so-called intelligent life may not know that we ever existed. I wonder what we are missing in all that science.

Sorry to say it but in relation to the age of the Earth we are like a minor pimple. If you made a circle graph of the history of the Earth it would be hard to find a pen fine enough to define our existence.

 

[itiwhetu]

So, in that case it is surprising that we think we are clever enough to destroy a planet

 

[jaylach]

So, in that case it is surprising that we think we are clever enough to destroy a planet

Sadly that is not true but I wish it were. Think about it... Let's say that the human body is a planet. A one cell virus can kill that human body/planet. Sad to say but I sometimes think that humans are the Earth's virus.

 

[Herpin Man]

Yes. Without a doubt climate change is being driven (or at least dramatically hastened) by human activity.

 

[TwoTankAmin]

So, in that case it is surprising that we think we are clever enough to destroy a planet

No you got this completely backwards. We are too stupid to realize that is exactly what we are doing. The earth will take care of itself because the infestation of human being will end because we will be gone. The planet will fix our mistakes and the earth will be here long after we are gone.

Consider the fact that we have the ability to feed everybody on the planet yet we let people starve to death all day long. We have the medical knowledge to give everybody decent health care, yet we do not care enough bout out fellow humans to do this either, But we are good at greed, we are good at war, we are good at killing each other.

Face it, people are just mostly stupid. We have the intelligence to allow every single human on the planet to have a decent quality of life, all it takes is the will do do so.

But lets use something with which we are all familiar, fish. Nature has seen fit to keep most fw fish species separated from each other. There are thriving ecosystems all over the planet which contain fish that will never ever meet each other. Then coonsider what we oh so smart humans do. We create aquariums which do what nature has seen fit not to, we mix those very species which would never meet in nature in or tanks. And then of course some of us seem fine with dumping non- native fish into local waters because why? Because we are stupid. Face the facts.

From the dawn of human kind we have found better ways to kill each other and to damage the planet. But is was not until the last centrury or two that we have elevated our ability to do actual harm to the balance of life on the planet. Why do you think some of the richest people on the planet are so involved with ways to get off the planet? Does anybody think that Covid was the worst we could unleash on ourselves. Do you even think we have it under control? Do you know that the next variant that develops wont be the most fatal one as well as the one that is vaccine resistant?

I will end my participation in this thread with one final observation. The SW and Reef keepers know this. If you dilute the salinity of your tank water by adding fresh water and diluting the salinity, it will kill the fish. Well if all the ice at the poles melts into the oceans, what happens to salinity levels? If the temperatures in the oceans change, so do the currents. And these will in turn change the weather. Global warming is at its most dangerous when it changes the temperature of the oceans than what it does to the air.

So, when the planet finally reaches the point where it will no longer support humans and the result is we are gone, the planet will not die. Nature will find a new balance and then what life survives us will continue until the planet dies a natural death, whatever that may be.

One last comment re the age of the earth. It is said by science to be 4.54 billion years old give or take 50 million. How much of an error is that? Well the are 1,000 millions in a billion. which means there are 4,540 millions in that 4.53 billion. So 50 million is 1/90.8 of the age. that is 1.1%, or put it another way, the 4.53 billion year estimate is 98.9% accurate at worst.

Consider that if we asked 50 members on this site at random to tell us to what the exact volume of water is in their biggest or their smallest tank. Then assume we could measure the actual volume of water accurately. How many of those 50 would have gotten their answer be within 1.1% on either side (+/-) of the actual volume? My money is on 0.

(Edited to fix spelling only.)

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

You say the world is
" But the earth has been here for a bit longer than we have. the planet is 4.543 billion years old give or take a few million."
Not exactly accurate, I would say it is a bit of a shame if we are around in the "give or take millions of years". It means that the next group of so-called intelligent life may not know that we ever existed. I wonder what we are missing in all that science.

Wait, what?
Do you believe the earth is 2000 years old or something?

 

[itiwhetu]

Wait, what?
Do you believe the earth is 2000 years old or something?

No not at all, I think this planet has been around forever. I think scientists like guessing at stuff and just produce a number, so they have something they can put in exam papers, so they can see if their students are paying attention in class.

 

[AdoraBelle Dearheart]

No not at all, I think this planet has been around forever. I think scientists like guessing at stuff and just produce a number, so they have something they can put in exam papers, so they can see if their students are paying attention in class.

Sometimes, I honestly cannot tell whether you're joking or not! I'm gonna leave that a mystery I think and just back away slowly, rather than question you any further

 

[Deleted member 149562]

Neanderthal have been around for much longer than humans have....some might say that there are still humans that behave like Neanderthal nowadays

If aging the lump of rock & water that we are tenants of....there is an argument (nothing new there) that Neanderthal existed 300 thousand years ago or as recent as 65 thousand years ago

Regardless of the side you take in the existance argument you park on....there have been mass extinctions, mass ice and mass drought at fairly regular intervals...along with a variety of diseases that killed populations off along the way. And that is long before the human as we know it now existed....not to mention industrial revolutions, coal mining, tin mining, gold mining et al

To accuse humans of having an effect on this rock & water lump's behaviour and weather is beyond impossible.....

This rock and water home that we have a very limited tenancy agreement on does its own thing, when it wants to, how it wants to and humans are just along for the (often very bumpy) ride.

 

[OnlyGenusCaps]

This all seems to come up from time to time around here. Often tangentially at first, but in this case pretty clearly someone wanted to express their stance. If folks are curious, here is a prior discussion of this topic that happened in the middle of a thread about the awful winter storm in Texas a couple winters back (started by @Slaphppy7 before he was an all powerful mod - congrats BTW, I couldn't imagine a better person for it!). The thread is closed because it got a bit heated. But you can read some of the responses there.

Winter Ice Storm in Texas

Much sympathy to all of you in Texas. At first I thought this was an issue with downed power lines but that's not the major problem, lack of generation is causing your woes. Texas needs to eliminate the independent ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas, how ironic) power grid. There is...

www.fishforums.net

I'll be honest, as someone who worked in a lab in graduate school that was focused on studying aspects of climate change, I sometimes find it a bit exhausting to discuss this with folks over and over. It can feel like a game of whack-a-mole. And I understand that there are new folks, so having walked through stuff with one person doesn't help the next. I get it. I do.

Here is the stance about anthropologically driven climate change from the entire scientific community: it's real. Full stop.

Folks that really want to better understand why what's the case, or have a reasoned discussion, I'm always happy to talk with. Truly.

Okay. I've said my piece.