Is global warming caused by humans and their activities?

Global warming is certainly a big issue within the society today. It cannot be said for sure what is the cause (humans or naturally occuring), but there is a lot of evidence for the 'naturally occuring' aspect:
- Firstly, human's carbon dioxide emmitions only make about 0.00054% of the atmosphere. With such a small amount, humans can't possibly be the cause?
- The Sun is the most likely cause of global warming.
- Mars's carbon dioxide ice caps have been melting for some time now (sound familiar?).
- Global warming causes extreme weather to occur, such as hurricanes or severe electric storms.
- Jupiter has been undergoing a huge freak storm for a long time (other planets are currently being affected by climate change as well).
- NASA has announced that global warming is occuring on Pluto.
- Neptune has eight moons, one of these called Triton. Triton is made of frozen nitrogen, but because of climate changes in the solar system, it is now turning into gas.
- During the Medieval Warm Period, temperatures were even more extreme than they have been lately.
- Have you ever seen one of those TV advertisements... when a huge chunk of ice breaks of the Antarctic? This is actually just as common as a leaf falling off a tree on an Autumn/Fall's day.
I would like to know how humans can be the cause for global warming. The Sun has a far greater impact on the Earth than humans could ever even try to achieve. It is not fair to blame ourselves for something we may not even be the cause of.

Answer

No. Throughout it's history, the earth has gone through a number of cooling and warming cycles, with an overall trend towards warming since the last Ice Age. The more pertainant question is whether or not human activity is accelerating the current warming cycle, which began in the late 1970's.

Another Answer

Yes. Although many scientists have concluded that humans are causing global warming, there remains a great deal of debate within the political community,

The reality is that science knows relatively little about how or why the earth's climate cycles back and forth, and there has been no definitive correlation between human activity and these climate cycles.

There is however no doubt that humans are releasing colossal amounts of so-called greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and that these gases absorb infrared radiation and trap heat in the atmosphere. What effect these emissions will ultimately have on the global climate and the environment is unsure (nobody can predict the future!), but there is definite scientific consensus that they will cause the global temperature to rise. The question is how much and how fast. That nobody really knows. Nobody actually thinks the temperature won't rise at least a little.

See this site for the most comprehensive and up to date studies on the subject: http://www.ipcc.ch/

And Another

"[H]umans are releasing colossal amounts of so-called greenhouse gases"? What do you call colossal? It's 26 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, by the way. If you add in the amount we exhale, and the amount that domesticated animals exhale, it gets up to 34 billion metric tons. Insect exhale 48 billion metric tons. But both of these pale in comparison to the amount of carbon dioxide released from the OCEANS.

Response to Above

This is certainly true. You didn't mention the amount that plant release also. However, you missed the key point here. What matters is not the relative contributions of those natural sources compared to the burning of fossil fuels. Those things are all in equilibrium or balance with the natural cycle and environment. In other words, the Earth is in a steady-state condition where as much CO₂ from natural sources is emitted as is absorbed. What humans are doing is throwing this balance off faster than the natural systems can adjust for.

A good analogy is a seesaw. Without humans there are two things in balance -- carbon emissions and carbon absorption. These are nicely balanced on the seesaw so that it is flat. Now humans are adding to the emissions, but the absorption isn't increasing fast enough to account for that. Yes, the two "people" on the two sides of the seesaw are huge, but as we start adding additional weight to the emissions side, the seesaw gets unbalanced, no matter how heavy the weights on the seesaw. So I mean "colossal" in that the amount is rapidly changing the balance of the seesaw. By "colassal" I mean about 21 billion metric tons of carbon per year. That's a lot in my book.

The problem is not about just total amounts of CO₂ in the world. Rather it is about an extremely rapid growth of CO₂ emissions that is far too fast to for the earth's natural carbon cycle to correct for. This leads to a buildup of CO₂ in the atmosphere that will not decrease for a timescale of about 1000-4000 years.
This isn't stipulation, junk science or anything else. This aspect is completely established and agreed upon by the scientific community. As I said above, how much of an effect this change in CO₂ will have is unclear, but there is NO QUESTION that humans are causing the increase of CO₂ concentration in our atmosphere. Whether humans are causing global warming is a point worth discussing, but that we are increasing the CO₂ levels is just a fact.

Balance?

So, your point is that human industrial emissions have thrown everything out of equilibrium. Your "solution" is to re-establish equilibirum by cutting human industrial emissions. Why does it have to be that way?! Why can't we re-establish equilibrium by cutting insect emissions? Can the earth tell the difference between carbon dioxide molecules exhaled by insects and carbon dioxide molecules created by SUVs? NO!

For billions of years, insects have been pumping CO₂ into the atmosphere, in REALLY collosal amounts, not the piss-ant collosal amounts you attribute to human industry. And now, when we get up to just over half of the insects' output, all of a sudden WE'RE the problem? Screw that! They've been accounting for more than their fair share for billions of years. It's time we put a stop to it. Kill the insects!

Yes, Balance

I don't think anywhere in the text above have I suggested any "solution" one way or the other. I haven't said anything about cutting industrial emissions or not! If you read what I wrote, you will see that ALL I said is that humans are emitting CO₂, this is upsetting the natural balance of the carbon cycle on earth, and therefore CO₂ emissions in the atmosphere are rising, and CO₂ is a greenhouse gas. THIS ISN'T DISPUTED BY ANYBODY! NOT EVEN THE OIL COMPANIES OR ANYBODY ELSE THAT IS HALF-WAY INFORMED!

How to solve the problem is up for debate, and sure, if you want to wipe out the insects, you could do that. Sounds like a truly brilliant plan to me. Perhaps you should consult with some biologists before you implement your doomsday-for-insects plan and ask them about how important insects are to plants and life on Earth in general. There is this thing called the food web, and its kind of important. And they might have some effects on the pollination and reproduction of plants, that all humans depend on to live. Not to mention that the insects haven't changed what they have been doing for the last 10 thousand years or so... but we have changed a great deal in the last 100 years... so yes, maybe we should consider taking responsibility for the changes we are making and the effects they will have on Earth. And if you ask me, yes, I'd rather have a world with insects and no SUV's than a world without insects where everybody drives a Hummer. But that's just me. I never said you shouldn't drive your SUV.

The point is that the insects emissions are in balance with the Earth's uptake of CO₂. Human-caused emissions of CO₂ are not in balance with the Earth's uptake. Period.

I have my own ideas about how to solve the problem, but that's not the question here, and I haven't said anything about them. If the question were "What should be done by humans to stop global warming?" then that answer would be appropriate. That's not the question we are addressing here however.

Sorry.

It matters not that insects haven't changed what they've been doing (and it's been a hell of a lot longer than 10,000 years). The fact of the matter is, however long they've been doing it, their "carbon footprint" dwarfs all other biological carbon dioxide sources on the planet combined, and is nearly twice as big as the that of human industry. And we can drastically reduce the carbon footprint of insects with very little ill effect on humans.

Of course, I was being slightly facetious when I said "kill the insects". I did not mean to imply that we should kill every single insect on the face of the planet. There are some insects that directly benefit mankind, and we should make every effort to preserve them. Bees, for example, help pollinate our fruit and vegetable crops, and we should protect them. Problem is, your "mother nature" that you think so highly of, that you think is trying to preserve some "balance" out there, is doing everything it can to make bees EXTINCT. First, there was the Africanized bees, which threatened to take over all the European bee hives in the western hemisphere. Admittedly, humans started that by releasing the Africanized bees in S. America. But mother nature did her part in helping to spread them. Then came the trachial mite, which virtually wiped out all wild bees in the US (including, thankfully, the Africanized ones), and over half of the domesticated bees. Now, there's some other disease, which no one can identify, that is again killing bees en masse. Looks like we're going to have to come up with another way to pollinate all those fruits and vegetables anyway. But fear not! Mankind has proven itself to be incredibly resourceful, adaptable, and innovative.

The only reason that insects' emissions are "in balance" and human emissions are not, according to you, is because the insects were emitting FIRST! That is a ludicrous standard for determining whose emissions are allowable and whose are not. The planet cannot tell the difference between a CO₂ molecule exhaled by a termite and a CO₂ molecule produced by an electricity plant. It is therefore ridiculous to say that the former is "in balance" with nature and the latter is not. It is the TOTAL that is "out of balance", and that balance can be restored by reducing either, or both.

I'll try again

I'll try to explain it again. Please stop claiming that I am saying things that I'm not. You have a lot of preconceived notions about my point of view. Stop putting words in my mouth.
The problem we are facing has to do with the rate of change of CO₂ emissions rapidly rising. The problem is that the rate of change of emissions is much greater than the rate of change of the mechanisms that uptake CO₂. That's it. And humans are the ones who are causing the very fast rate of change.

I'm not claiming some silly argument about mother earth! For the 3rd time, it doesn't matter what your carbon footprint it compared to the insects or anything else. What matter is that CO₂ emissions GROWTH RATE (not total amount, but growth rate, which is different) far exceeds the rate at which the natural mechanisms for loss of CO₂ in the atmosphere (primarily the oceans). There is nothing special about "balance" unless you don't want things to change. I'm not saying it is wrong to increase CO₂ levels, I'm just saying that is what we are doing! When things are out of balance, they change. There is no value judgment here about if that good or bad. But they are CO₂ levels are rising, and we are causing that rise. If you don't see that, you need to get informed about the science.

Let me try to give another example since you didn't get the seesaw one. It is like a bathtub, being filled with water and emptied through the drain simultaneously. For ages, there has been a certain level of water in the tub. This is in a steady state configuration because it is draining as fast as it is being refilled. The faucet is running at exactly the same rate as the drain is draining, thus there is no change. However, humans are suddenly opening up the faucet now. We are not however opening up the drain at the same time. Since currently the drain is draining as fast as it can, turning up the faucet causes the level of the tub to rise. The drain will eventually open up more, but very slowly because things on this planet do not respond that quickly to such changes (hundreds to thousands of years). However, we're opening up the faucet in tens to hundreds of years. So in the meantime, the level of water in the tub rises. Yes, the faucet is just gushing massive amounts of water (the CO₂ due to insects, etc). But the drain is also draining massive amounts of water. THAT DOESN'T MATTER! What matters is that we opening the faucet more than what is has been for a long long time... even if just a little, and the drain is not opening fast enough to compensate.

I agree CO₂ from an insect mouth is no different than a tailpipe... obviously. And I do know that you were being facetious about killing insects. And yes, it's true that you can also reduce CO₂ by a number of ways other than stopping burning oil. Sure. The point was that no way is simple, and every method has side effects and those need to be considered fully before implementing the "final solution for bugs" or whatever other solution is proposed.

We're doing an experiment with this planet, and it's the only one we've got. If we screw it up, we'll live with the consequences for a long time. Nothing inherently wrong with change. It's just that if we don't like what changes, we won't be able to go back anymore. It might turn out just fine. But it might not. So are you feeling lucky? Maybe...

Answer

No

First answer by MitchFF. Last edit by Mia puppia. Contributor trust: 19 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 28 [recommend question]