06-13-2017, 08:58 PM
(06-13-2017, 06:31 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: This is pretty close to where I am on it. I think the climate changes on it's own (hence the no more Ice Age right now, or how there were no ice caps during the Dinosaurs) and I don't know how much of an impact humans have on it (or how much it really matters) but I do enjoy having clean air and water.
That's why I wanted the US to pull out of the Paris Accord, but maintain their reduction in emissions/pollution anyway.
My take based upon logic and evidence provided by longer term info such as ice cores that give very accurate info going back hundreds of thousands of years, and fossilized stomata evidence that can go back millions of years is the following:
The earth has natural climate/temperature cycles.
Temperatures have been shown to have a very close correlation to CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
The normal cycling of CO2 levels has hardly ever exceeded 300 ppm in the Earth's atmosphere, and when they did, they just barely exceeded it. This was even during massive volcanic eruption times and other natural events that disperse large volumes of CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Since humans began burning fossil fuels, the levels of free CO2 in the atmosphere have been steadily increasing...the Earth can't recapture it at the rate we are emitting it.
CO2 levels in the atmosphere are now exceeding 400 ppm...a level which the Earth has never seen before as far as we can tell from all our methods of evidence.
With newer industrialized and high population nations coming online such as China and India, those levels will do nothing but rise due to the lack of regulations for emissions in those countries.
I don't believe humans are the sole cause of climate change, but the evidence shows that we are definitely contributing to a faster rate of change....and possibly a higher amount of temperature change than would occur naturally.
If we say man is the most intelligent creature on Earth, then that in effect means we should be stewards of the Earth for all other living things. The Earth is sending us clear cut signals that things are not healthy, yet we continue to debate it at the political level, instead of the common sense level.
Humans are contributing to climate change....there is no way we cannot be doing so.
