Analysis

Global Warming is one of the biggest issues in the world today. The media and politicians have talked about it often, trying to "teach" the general public about it (An Inconvenient Truth). However, many important details are left out of what is generally taught about global warming that portrays it in an incorrect way (http://www.john-daly.com/cooling.htm).

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

Are We In For A Little Ice Age?

One interesting fact that I learned three years ago about global warming is that it can actually increase the chance of there being a global cooling period, known as a little ice age. However, before I did not really understand this at all honestly. I wrote about it in my paper without the least bit of true understanding. However, I have recently found how this type of event could occur.

First of all, to understand how global warming could cause a little ice age, we first need to look at how the little ice age could happen. One way that an ice age could happen is by the ocean currents being distorted or destroyed, mainly the Gulf Stream. The Gulf stream is part of what keeps North America and Europe nice and toasty. So without if the current is destroyed, there will be a great decrease in temperature.

So how does global warming affect this? Well by melting the polar ice caps, cold freshwater is let in to the ocean. If this change reached the Gulf Stream, the changes of temperature and concentration of the salt water in the current is expected to distort the current. If this happens then one of the things keeping us warm will change, probably for the worst (as in making us cold). The affects could do anything from a full on ice age to another little ice age as what happened from around the 14th to 19th centuries. Personally I think the little ice age is more probable, if either is to happen at all, but I don't think it will be anything that we won't be able to manage.

So as for my title question, the answer is maybe. At this point such an event is impossible to predict. However, it remains a possibility.

Sources used:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0130-11.htm

Some Thoughts on Hydrogen Cars

Well as I said in the title, I would be talking about green technologies in my posts here on the blog, and the first one that has caught my interest is Hydrogen Cars. Hydrogen Cars have had lots of critiques over the years about whether or not we could make then, and how expensive they would be.

As for whether or not it is possible to build hydrogen cars, the clear answer now is that it is possible. So this is no longer an issue to discuss about hydrogen cars.

However, there are two main issues I would like to discuss.

The first of these is price. As far as how expensive the cars would be, they would be really expensive, both to make and to fuel and even fuel cells if those were to be used instead of the hydrogen combustion engines. Some of the estimates that I saw end up being about 50,000 dollars more than normal cars and then there is the price of fuel. However, with fuel cells, there is talk that mass production of the cars could drastically reduce price, which makes sense according to economic theory. One estimate showed that a certain hydrogen fueled truck with fuel cells could be sold for about $20,000 bucks. That's not too bad when compared to our current prices; it is much better than a $50,000 difference.

The second issue is about the main by product of hydrogen cars, water vapor. Some of you may be thinking at this point (and I did too) that since water vapor is a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, hydrogen cars may cause global warming more than normal cars do. However some research on this showed that to be false. For one thing, water vapor is actually also a by product of normal cars and supposedly not much more is emitted by hydrogen cars than by normal cars. So because of the added carbon dioxide emissions in normal cars, they most likely do emit more greenhouse gas than hydrogen cars and definitely cause more pollution.

So to conclude, I think that hydrogen cars will be an efficient green technology if the day does come where they are easily affordable.

source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4563676/

Water Vapor and Greenhouse Gases

As I said in my introduction, Water Vapor causes more Global Warming than any of the other greenhouse gases. I first heard this fact from a founder of the Environmental Protection Agency. Since then, whenever I have searched for conformation on this, I have seen that any website that is willing to mention water vapor as a greenhouse gas, since it seems like some poeple *cough* Al Gore *cough* do not even mention in their strives to convince people of the effects of Carbon Dioxide. These same sources also show that the vast majority of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (as well as almost every other greenhouse gas) is there by natural causes.

Now there are also those people who say that more and more water is being evaporated into the atmosphere because of increased temperatures made by the greenhouse gases man is emiting and therefore increasing the amount of water vapor and the effects of it in the atmosphere. However, if water vapor is the worst of the greenhouse gases by such a landslide of being 95%, then does it not make sense that water vapor itself contributes to much of the increasing amount of water vapor in the atmosphere? Basically, water vapor itself is causing an increased amount of water vapor more than other greenhouse gases. While I have yet to find a source that agrees with this idea of mine (and i will continue to search for one) it makes sense to me and I cannot think of a way that it is wrong.

Here are my sources where I found information concerning this:
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/glossary.html#Global_warming
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html

An Introduction

Global Warming is an issue we hear much about in the news. Is it a big deal? Or is it not really important? This debate goes on in the world. Some people worry that global warming will cause the end of the world like it did in the movie The Day After Tomorrow. If the end of the world is coming, well, the whole world needs to be aware and do something to stop this.

Three years ago, I did a research paper on global warming. I started out using sources that showed the same mainstream information that most people know about with carbon dioxide being the main cause and how it is put there. However, after I had written that version of my paper I interviewed one of the founders of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Charles Hosler, over the phone. After I got off the phone with him I was utterly shocked at what he had told me. Everything that I had been taught in schools about global warming was now shown to me as a lie. I had to do more research on this. Looking at a few more interviews I did with other knowledgeable people that I knew, and researching the internet, I found that what Mr. Hosler had told me seemed to be true. I then had to trash my original paper and start over from scratch.

So now you are probably thinking “What was it that he found that changed his views so much.” Well, what I found was that global warming is a COMPLETELY NATURAL PROCESS. One of the first things Mr. Hosler told me was that ninety-five percent of greenhouse gases were water vapor.

To some, this may seem unbelievable. Thinking that most of what we have been told about global warming is a lie. If some random stranger had come up to me and said that, there is no way I would have believed it. However, a founder of the EPA was quite convincing. So I hope that this blog will be looked on with an open mind while I once again explore the depths of global warming.