Global Warming: Fact or Myth?

Hi there. Today's topic is global warming and whether it exists or not and what I think about it.

First, I would like to post this video I had seen a while back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ

I had seen this video a couple years back and thought it had a couple interesting ideas, although the guy is a bit extreme. If you have an extra ten minutes to watch, do so.

The thing I like about youtube videos is that, no matter what video you watch, in the comments section you will always find someone arguing/debating with someone else. Now in this one, you can't always trust what everyone says, because after all it is youtube, but you have a wider variety of watchers and points of view from different people.

The point of the video is that we debate whether global warming is fact or myth. But whether it's real or not, we shouldn't debate on that. Lets face it, we're just wasting more and more money to find out whether or not it exists. We should take the precautionary measures to fix the environment, because the risk is much outweighed in not doing so. Plus, if we do anything that is environmentally friendly, even if global warming doesn't exist, we are still bettering the environment.

The question I will be answering today are: 1) According to evidence, is the climate changing? 2) What does the evidence say about human roles and impacts? 3) How is climate change likely to affect us? I will also be answering why skepticism still exists and why people might or might not believe in global warming.

One thing I read, as well as learned from both my marine biology class and readings online is that phytoplankton makes roughly %70-%80 of the oxygen in the atmosphere. I also read online that ocean acidification from carbon emissions is having an impact on marine life. These carbon emissions aren't coming from anywhere else but us humans, so we have to cut it down, and the site which i read this on (http://dels-old.nas.edu/climatechange/) said we should restrict our use of carbon emissions to %50 of what it used to be in 1990!

On the site http://unfccc.int/resource/iuckit/cckit2001en.pdf, it is estimated that the climate could go up anywhere from 1.4-5.8 degrees Celsius in the next hundred years. They also stated that this would be a bigger rise in temperature than there has ever been, meaning we are obviously the ones causing it, because it does not seem to be done naturally.

On http://environment.yale.edu/climate/, Yale scientists stated that over half of all Americans believe in global warming, although not everyone says it is caused by humans. It is fact, and we can look back at temperatures from previous years, that the globe is getting hotter. But we are also increasing the temperature faster than we should.

So far it seems that yes, the climate is changing, regardless of human impact or not, but the evidence also says that it is most likely human impact. Now how is it affecting us? As mentioned, it is having an impact on marine life, as well as the ozone layer. So what else is left on the globe for us to destroy? There are too many ways in which we are affecting the earth, too many to state.

Now onto the skepticism. Many scientists believe in global warming, but there are also those who don't believe. On the website http://heartland.org/ideas/global-warming-not-crisis it states global warming is not a crisis. Yet it also mentions just before that, that two thirds of the global warming in the 1990's was natural. They're trying to brush off the one third of the global warming that we did as if it were nothing. That ridiculous! That is quite the impact. So now, back to the video I had first mentioned, we can keep arguing about whether warming exists or not, or we can take action, since even the skeptics know we are warming the earth, and do something about it. We're spending money on deciding whether warming is caused by humans or not or if it's even happening when we could be spending it on making things better. So now it's up to us.