One of the most known politicians who talks about global warming is Al Gore. All he seems to talk about in his power point on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, is about how carbon dioxide is going to cause the downfall of the earth if we do not stop it. However, this is not the case. While global warming is happening, and could possibly have some devastating effects on the world, it is mostly a completely natural process.
The main cause of global warming is the worst greenhouse gas, water vapor. While carbon dioxide is the second worst gas, water vapor makes up for the majority of gases that affect global warming (http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html). Think of how weathermen make day to day forecasts. They do not use the levels of carbon dioxide in the air to make predictions because the levels are insignificant, however they do use the levels of water vapor because water vapor levels are significant. Even NASA has recently taken measurements that show water vapor as adding to the greenhouse effect is higher than all other greenhouse gases and that water vapor can add to the effect caused by other greenhouse gases (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
). For example, take a desert (the hot ones, not the cold ones for this example). A desert is very hot during the day, and very cold at night. Why is this? Well deserts have very low precipitation, and therefore have very little moisture, or water vapor, in their air. Since deserts are lacking in water vapor and clouds, there is no moisture to hold in the heat that the sun emits, so this heat quickly escapes at night and the desert becomes really cold.
Also, if you look at graphs of global warming over time plotted with a time line of hundreds of thousands of years, you can see that the earth has been warming and cooling constantly in the past, and we are just now at the top of the warm side.
One funny thing is that after the posting of that graph on the site I got it from, the author is telling about how our peak is not constant with temperature when it should be. However, the peak on the last side appears on the graph to be the absolute most constant peak of all the high warm periods.
Now we all know that the closer to the equator you are, the warmer you are. Well look at this graph of the world's distribution of water vapor.
As you can clearly see, the closer you get to the equator, the higher the concentration of water vapor is. Coincidence? I think not! It is common sense for anyone who experiences humidity that increased water vapor in the air increases temperature and help hold that heat in.
Also about carbon dioxide, most of it is natural (http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html).
As you can see in this chart, the majority of carbon dioxide is natural. Adding even more to the fact that global warming is natural.
In my research, I have found those who would say that carbon dioxide heats up the earth just enough to add to the amount of water vapor through causing more evaporation (http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm). While this may be true, it seems much more logical to me that the worst greenhouse gas, water vapor, is what would cause there to be more evaporation. So I do not believe these arguments to be true or justified, and I have seen absolutely no evidence for this claim (even some who have made this claim say it is impossible to get a measurement on the effect of carbon dioxide on water vapor, seems fishy to me).
One other recent fact that I have found is that there is that even though there is a general trend in increasing temperature, there is still a lot of variance in temperature. This month on October 16th Washington D.C. experienced its coldest October 16th in 138 years (http://www.globalwarming.org/). So even though global warming is happening, there are still plenty of cold days out there that are colder than previous temperatures, meaning that there is only a slight amount of warming happening for the natural variance to cover such a thing as the coldest day in 138 years since the natural variance is less than a tenth of a degree (http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5142&page=21).
However, in my research, there are still so many people who say that global warming is caused by man. Why this is I am not really sure. However, I do know that it is many of those saying this is the media and politicians (e.g. Al Gore). So what should we trust? Media and Politicians, or science and common sense?
So is there anything we can do to prevent climate change? Probably not since it is a natural process, and even if we could the end effects could be devastating considering what we would have to do to the earth to stop it.
Even though we cannot stop climate change, there are some things that it could affect that deserves to be mentioned. Many of the supposed effects include extreme weather (e.g. hurricanes), increased drought and flooding, higher sea levels, and perhaps worst of all a potential ice age. So if there ends up being a way in which we can stop catastrophes, I say we go for it.
So as I have shown, global warming is a natural process, caused mostly by natural greenhouse gases.
sources:
http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcolddesert.htm
An Inconvenient Truth - Al Gore
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://pub.uvm.dk/2003/learnersguide/images/lg5x44x1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://pub.uvm.dk/2003/learnersguide/html/chapter03.htm&usg=__tWG7OfNVFTuRhRwmp3UNF_kIYdE=&h=227&w=339&sz=39&hl=en&start=232&um=1&tbnid=JL8-sNsiyVcJeM:&tbnh=80&tbnw=119&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dworld%2Btemperatures%2Bover%2Bthousands%2Bof%2Byears%26ndsp%3D21%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26sa%3DN%26start%3D231%26um%3D1
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/mockler.html
http://www.john-daly.com/cooling.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas
http://www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/vapor_warming.html
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/habyhints/155/
http://www.slate.com/id/2182564/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming
http://ezinearticles.com/?Negative-Effects-of-Global-Warming&id=557033
http://www.oppapers.com/essays/Negative-Effects-Global-Warming/142541
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm
http://www.globalwarming.org/
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
http://epa.gov/climatechange/kids/gw.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=5142&page=21
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