Increased Number Think Global Warming Is “Exaggerated”

[theRepublic]

Strategyking92 said:

Thatmax said:

Strategyking92 said:
When the whole paranoia of it all hit, I believed in global warming, but I think it's bullshit now. This has all happened many times before, it's nothing new. I just wonder how bad it will get.

 

A prime example of what a lot of people are feeling, during that first few years where Climate change was most in the public eye everyone for some strange reason thought that the effects would be felt in a few years which is completely untrue. Not enough facts about climate change were given to the public in an easy to understand format, the focus was on how to lower emissions etc so the general population is uneducated about the matter.

 

Whoa, I'm not saying climate change is bullshit, I'm saying global warming is. You know, Crazy Als' theory.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/232454/78

Objection: Climate has always changed. Why are we worried now, and why does it have to be humans' fault?

Answer: Yes, climate has varied in the past, for many different reasons, some better understood than others. Present-day climate change is well understood, and different. Noting that something happened before without humans does not demonstrate that humans are not causing it today.


For example, we see in ice core records from Antarctica and Greenland that the world cycled in and out of glacial periods over 120Kyr cycles. That climate cycle's timing is fairly well understood to be caused by changes in the orbit of the earth, though the mechanism behind the response has not been conclusively established. These orbital cycles are regular and predictable and they are definitely not the cause of today's warming. The other important difference between the glacial-interglacial cycles and today is the rapidity of the current change. The rate of warming is on the order of 10 times faster today than in the ice cores.

Such rapid warming on a global scale is quite rare in the geological record, and while it may not be entirely unprecedented, there is strong evidence that whenever such a change has happened, whatever the cause, it was a catastrophic event for the biosphere.