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NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE VS. GLOBAL WARMING
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DISCLAIMER: As you know, Carbon Blueprints is dedicated to accuracy and truth. This site is allowing this discussion, of which each "fact" must be backed up by research and accurate data, in order make sure we know what is true, what is myth, and what is a lie.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NATURAL CLIMATE CHANGE AND GLOBAL WARMING?:
As we find from our research on this subject, the question is not, has the earth warmed up in the past hundred years, for it has. (Research shows that the earth has also cooled since 1998 until the current year minus 2006 which was a record year) Instead the question is, did this all occur as a natural cycle that occurs through the years or is this from the effects of humans and industrialization?

Some may say this is because of industrialization because we have only begun to research and record the changes in the climate with great accuracy within the last 40 years. When the industrial revoloution began and fossil fuels were discovered and began to be burned, the research over climate change was not a well studied topic and accurate temperature readings were not taken due to lack of need, technology, etc. But with what records they have been able to acquire a trend has been found to show an increase in temperature,(until 1998 when it began to decrease) though is this due to human advancement or nature?

Carbon Cycle



Because of history we know that there have been times of Natural Climate Change, both colder and hotter spells. The Romans Empire went through a hot spell around 600BC to 200 AD where the Saraha Desert and almost all of North Africa was wet and fertile and became dry and desolate. There was also a Medieval Warming from 900 - 1300 AD when Eric the Red Colonized Greenland. There was also a cold spell from 1300-1850 AD that killed off these colonies, farms, and many of it's people. These cannot be proven beyond a shade of a doubt because these happened so long ago but archeologists and known history claims these environmental changes to be certain.

It has happened in the past but does that mean it is happening now? No, not for certain. The limited history and knowledge of what is happening on the earth can only be speculated on. Could it be that the human effect is amplifying the problem, again this is hard to know, if it is amplifying it, we would need to have a base knowledge of the change that would occur, which is impossible to establish since the earth holds so many secrets. This base knowledge comes from a world wide base level of emissions that were on the earth before the Industrial Revolution, which is an unknown. We would need to know this level of emissions to find out how much humans have added to earth's total carbon emissions. Yet we only started recording emissions after the Industrial Revolution already began. Ice cores and other research are only so accurate. Can we rule it out, though? NO.

"THEORY" = Prediction for the Future
"MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA" = Data is not in and has not been provided as of yet.

 "FACT" = data is in and there is no question.
"CONFLICT" is when both sides have accurate" data but they conflict.
SOURCE:
GLOBAL WARMING
NATURAL CYCLE OF ENVIRONMENT
SOURCE:

NATURE.ORG - Facts on Global Warming

(PORTION CONFIRMED AND PARTIALLY CONFLICTING)

The science of [global warming] is complex, but everyone should know the basics: the Earth is heating up because gases produced from vehicles, power plants, deforestation, and other sources are building up in the atmosphere, acting like a thick blanket over our planet.

  • FACT: Average global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the 20th century.
  • FACT: The United States contains only 5 percent of the world’s population, but contributes 22 percent of the world’s carbon emissions.
  • FACT: Between 20 and 25 percent of carbon emissions come from deforestation and land use change.
  • FACT: The Golden Toad (Bufo periglenes) is thought to be the first species to go extinct because of climate change.
  • FACT: Personal cars and trucks in the United States emit 20 percent of the United States' carbon emissions.
  • FACT: Air conditioning and heating account for almost half of electricity use in the average American home.
  • FACT: Climate change is linked to stronger hurricanes, more drought and increased coral deaths from bleaching.
  • FACT: Climate change is linked to an increase in disease-carrying pests that lead to the increased spread of diseases such as dengue fever, malaria, lyme disease and West Nile virus.

Human activities have little to do with the Earth's current warming trend, according to a new book by Denis Avery and Fred Singer, Adjunct Scholars with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA).  In fact, the book concludes that global warming and cooling seem to be part of a 1,500-year cycle of moderate temperature swings.  Coming out as the leadership of Congress shifts, the book - "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years - builds on research the two previously outlined in an NCPA study.

"The evidence supporting a 1,500- year cycle is too great to dismiss," said S. Fred Singer, co-author of the book, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia and president of the Science and Environment Policy Project.  "Evidence from every continent and ocean confirms the 1,500-year cycle," added Dennis Avery, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the book's other co-author.

According to Avery and Singer, within the 90,000-year Ice Age cycles, the Earth also experiences 1,500-year warming-cooling cycles. The current warming began about 1850 and will possibly continue for another 500 years. Their findings are drawn from physical evidence of past climate cycles that have been documented by researchers around the world from tree rings and ice cores, stalagmites and dust plumes, prehistoric villages and collapsed cultures, fossilized pollen and algae skeletons, titanium profiles and niobium ions, and other sources. 

NCPA - NATIONAL CENTER OF POLICY ANALYSIS - There may be a 1500 years climate cycle of both warming and colding.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - Facts that the world is warming.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

Yes. Earth is already showing many signs of worldwide climate change.

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century's last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

 

Correlations between rising CO2 levels and global surface temperatures suggest that our planet is on a one-way warming trend triggered by human activity. Indeed, studies by paleoclimatologists reveal that natural variability caused by changes in the Sun and volcanic eruptions can largely explain deviations in global temperature from 1000 AD until 1850 AD, near the beginning of the Industrial Era. After that, the best models require a human-induced greenhouse effect.

In spite of what may seem persuasive evidence, many scientists are nonetheless skeptical.

They argue that natural variations in climate are considerable and not well understood. The Earth has gone through warming periods before without human influence, they note. And not all of the evidence supports global warming. Air temperatures in the lower atmosphere have not increased appreciably, according to satellite data, and the sea ice around Antarctica has actually been growing for the last 20 years.

NASA - EARTH'S FIDGETING CLIMATE - The Earth has gone through a warming period before.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC - Facts that the world is warming.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana's Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

• Coral reefs, which are highly sensitive to small changes in water temperature, suffered the worst bleaching—or die-off in response to stress—ever recorded in 1998, with some areas seeing bleach rates of 70 percent. Experts expect these sorts of events to increase in frequency and intensity in the next 50 years as sea temperatures rise.

• An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts.

Other natural processes could account for the thinning as well. Ocean currents might have caused part of the change. Or the flux of warm water into the North Atlantic caused by the 1990-1996 positive phase of the slow-moving North Atlantic Oscillation could have had an influence. The ice sheet could also be thinning in response to the long-term warming of the planet since the transition from the last glacial period about 10,000 years ago. Krabill, Dr. Ron Kwok of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Abdalati mentioned these scenerios during interviews with Science@NASA.

Scientists often refer to these alternate explanations under the umbrella term of "natural variability."

NASA - EARTH'S FIDGETING CLIMATE - There are three possibilities of why the Greenland Ice Sheets are melting that are natural occurances.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND - Quick Facts about Global Warming

(PARTIAL CONFLICT, PARTIAL CONFIRMED WITH DATA)

Global warming is an intensification of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect refers to the natural system that keeps Earth warm enough to sustain life--this is a good thing. But an abundance of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere has been collecting in the atmosphere and effectively forming an additional heat blanket around the Earth. In other words, human activities are intensifying the greenhouse effect and moving the Earth's temperature to dangerous levels. 

Weather and climate are different. Weather in a given area can fluctuate significantly from year to year regardless of whether or not the climate is changing. Climate, which refers to average weather conditions over a longer period of time (such as a few decades, at minimum), can show clearer signs of human-produced changes.

They point as evidence of this natural cycle to the “Climate Optimum” - a period of warmer and wetter weather than the present Earth’s climate, which took place 9,000 years ago to 5,000 years ago, and a cooling event 2,600 years ago.

During the Roman warming period from 200 BC to around AD 600 North Africa and the Sahara were wetter and supported crops. In more recent times they point to the Medieval warming of 900 to 1300, when Eric the Red’s descendants colonised Greenland and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1850 which saw the Norse dairy farmers on Greenland grow short from malnutrition and eventually die out.

Telegraph.co .uk - There have been climate cool downs and warm-ups in the past.

(FACT - Historical Findings)

ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND - Quick Facts about Global Warming

(1st Paragraph - THEORY BASED, 2nd Paragraph - MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA, records have only been kept for 100 years)

Global warming refers to a warming of the average global temperature. It does not preclude cooling in some locations. In fact, if some locations are cooling while the globe is warming on average, it follows that there must be other areas that are warming even faster than the global average. This is precisely what is happening in the Arctic, where temperatures over the past few decades have risen twice as fast as the global average, with potentially disastrous consequences. Polar bears in the southern range, for instance, who hunt on sea ice, experience shorter hunting seasons now that sea ice melts earlier in the spring and freezes later in the fall. Read about these and other findings laid out in the recent eight-nation report, Impacts of a Warming Arctic.  

2004 was the fourth warmest year on record. The 10 hottest years on record have all occurred since 1990.

Scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing moderate natural climate cycle in the 1980s, when Willi Dansgaard of Denmark and Hans Oeschger of Switzerland first saw two mile-long ice cores from Greenland representing 250,000 years of Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. From their initial examination, Dansgaard and Oeschger estimated the smaller temperature cycles at 2,550 years. Subsequent research shortened the estimated length of the cycles to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years). Other substantiating findings followed:

  • An ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier — at the other end of the world from Greenland — showed the same 1,500-year cycle through its 400,000-year length.
  • The ice-core findings correlated with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.
  • Independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland, reported in 1997, showed nine of the 1,500-year cycles in the last 12,000 years.

NCPA - National Center of Policy Analysis - Evidence and studies for a 1500 year climate cycle.

(MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

ENVIRONMENTAL DEFENSE FUND - Quick Facts about Global Warming

(1st Paragraph - THEORY BASED, 2nd Paragraph - CONFLICTED - Volcanic Activity Under Ice Shelf, 3rd Paragraph - MUST CONFIRM WITH DATA)

Record heat waves responsible for some 26,000 deaths battered Europe in the summer of 2003. The scorching temperatures caused over $16 billion in damages to agriculture and other industries. Global warming has already doubled the risk of such events, according to a paper in the scientific journal Nature.

A massive ice shelf the size of Rhode Island broke off from Antarctica in 2002. Rapidly warming temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula were blamed for the loss of the Larsen B Ice Shelf.

The melting of glaciers around the world have been contributing to sea level rise around the globe, which means damage to the United States' booming coastal counties that are now home to more than half of the U.S. population.

    
       
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