Re: New information surrounding global warming
Should be noted that methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, but that it also cycles out of the atmosphere naturally in a way that CO2 doesn't.
As for terminology: it's not that global warming is an inaccurate description of one element of global climate change, but it's just one part. While my understanding was that the politics had worked the other way - that opponents to action thought climate change a less ominous term than global warming and adjusted accordingly - the former is simply a more accurate term no matter what stance or politics it's coming from. NASA prefers it.
Originally Posted by
cprofitt
So, you are telling me that the permian life forms did not change their behavior and it led to their extinction?
It isn't as funny in the Permian, since the life forms we consider to have been the "dominant" ones had nothing to do with the climate change that killed them. The Oxygen Catastrophe offers up a much more ironic parallel.
I firmly believe that man should do what it can to not 'add' to any natural cycle of warming or cooling, but I am still not sold that man is the cause. The Permian extinction supports both the fact that 'we have an issue' and the fract that it might not be caused by man.
There are articles talking about the sun being part of the cause:
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/...ole-in-global/http://wakeup-world.com/2011/09/02/c...ed-by-the-sun/
There are of course articles disputing those above.
What impact does the change in the earth's rotation have?
What about the Earth's orbit... I have read that it is getting further from the sun.
There are a great many factors... playing the 'blame' game just makes people argue the point. Simply stating that global warming is happening and that it is bad is enough. Then identify what man might be able to do to slow the process down.
VTPoet nicely addressed each of your individual points here, but I think that one thing to really consider is that long-term causes are not likely to effect sudden inflections like the one we've seen. We still don't really know what caused the changes at the end of the Permian, but we don't look to changes in the sun's radiation or the Earth's orbit; there are possibilities in volcanic activity and, as always, the possibility of an impact of some kind (which wouldn't leave a crater we could see; thanks to ongoing subduction of non-continental crust, the sea floor is much younger than the Permian.)
I know I shouldn't use tildes for decoration, but they always make me feel at home~
Bookmarks