Humans are by far the leading cause of global warming

Skeptical Science has posted a thorough and comprehensive review of all the scientific literature, weighing all the various contributing variables leading to the present warming trend. We humans and our activities are, far and away, the number one contributing factor.



According to these studies, despite a small cooling effect caused by the natural terrestrial climate processes shown in some of these studies, we’ve more than swamped the cooling contributions out. It all looks pretty bleak, where we’ve raised CO2 levels to their highest in 800,000 years… and yet we’re still fighting with people who deny that CO2 can even harm the environment, or that we’re having an appreciable effect on CO2 levels, or that warming is even happening. It seems as though we’re in a fight for the survival of our species, and we are our own enemy both in terms of who will slit our throats, and in terms of who’s stopping us from staying our own hand.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, though. If only we can reach it in time. We need to break our fossil fuel addiction, and we need to do it… oh, about twenty years ago. Science — the same science that we misused to get us into this mess — can get us out. For instance, we’ve found a new bacteria that can turn seaweed into ethanol, and solar technology continues apace. If we destroy our planet, if we cannot undo the damage we have done, then as I’ve said before, perhaps we deserve to die out. That’s how natural selection’s supposed to work, after all.

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Humans are by far the leading cause of global warming
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8 thoughts on “Humans are by far the leading cause of global warming

  1. 1

    humans evolved via natural evolutionary processes. therefore global warming has a root cause in natural processes. it’s not *humans* causing global warming, it is the natural processe of evolution that causes global warming via human mechanisms.

    come to think of it, if it weren’t for the sun’s bath of electromagnetic energy, life as we know it wouldn’t have evolved–therefore the root cause of global warming is the sun.

    wait wait wait. the sun was formed via gravitational collapse of interstellar gas that reached a critical density for fusion to begin. therefore gravity is the cause of global warming.

    wait. the theory of big bang nucleosynthesis says that all matter and the four fundamental forces were created 13 billion years ago. therefore the big bang causes global warming.

    DAMN YOU BIG BANG!!!!111!!1!

  2. 3

    klem: perhaps you missed the part where we can actually change how we act. Just because we’ve decided that we’re “naturally” going to act a certain way doesn’t mean we have to KEEP acting that way.

  3. F
    6

    Bacteria don’t make decisions based on ideology. Of course, “deserve” may be a bit loaded, but it is a very human word to use, and not wildly inaccurate.

  4. rob
    7

    as a scientist, i officially have to say that no, we are NOT trying to take over the world.

    bwaa ha ha.

    also, here is a good website that has had several posts evaluating different energy sources and how they will fit in to our energy future as our current reserves are depleted.

    never mind that the author of the site is also a scientist…

    http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/

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