If so, could this be the cause of global warming?
207941
But you can open the fridge and cool it off!
64169
Fungi?\nWell,if it's everything the article indicates it might be,\nsuch a fuel could be a godsend-especially if it really does cut down greenhouse emissions.I would have to reserve judgement on that until it's confirmed,though,it could be just political hype.Even if it's all true,we should continue exploring other alternatives such as solar energy\nwhich would have no effect at all on the environment.\n Still,this could possibly be the one positive result of Bush's Presidency.
301125
The fact that the globe has been slowly warming up ever since the last ice age should be reason enough to suspect that global warming isn't at all a catastrophe.  We people on Earth really need to start looking to other problems like natural resources.
610168
The article actually states that this is the warmest in over 2000 years or more. The article talks about volcanoes erupting and other phenomenons from 1 AD to about 1850.  This did cause some green house gas because of the release of the different greenhouse gases,but they aren't really comparing what it is happening now to what was going on then. They talk about glaciers melting and the earth heating up. They also talked about humans pumping CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. There has also been evidence seen that this is the warmest since about 420,000 years ago. This was proven through ice cores drilled in the poles and they were able to measure the CO2 concentration and compare it to today. Maybe next time you should read the entire article.
666586
Global warming started long before the "Industrial Revolution" and the invention of the internal combustion engine. Global warming began 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming its way out of the Pleistocene Ice Age-- a time when much of North America, Europe, and Asia lay buried beneath great sheets of glacial ice.\n\nEarth's climate and the biosphere have been in constant flux, dominated by ice ages and glaciers for the past several million years. We are currently enjoying a temporary reprieve from the deep freeze.\n\nApproximately every 100,000 years Earth's climate warms up temporarily. These warm periods, called interglacial periods, appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to a cold ice age climate. At year 18,000 and counting our current interglacial vacation from the Ice Age is much nearer it's end than it's beginning.\n\nGlobal warming during Earth's current interglacial warm period has greatly altered our environment and the distribution and diversity of all life. For example:\n\n\n Approximately 15,000 years ago the earth had warmed sufficiently to halt the advance of glaciers, and sea levels worldwide began to rise.\n\n By 8,000 years ago the land bridge across the Bearing Strait was drowned, cutting off the migration of men and animals to North America.\n\n Since the end of the Ice Age, Earth's temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet ! Forests have returned where once there was only ice.\n\nDuring ice ages our planet is cold, dry, and inhospitable-- supporting few forests but plenty of glaciers and deserts. Like a spread of collosal bulldozers, glaciers have scraped and pulverized vast stretches of Earth's surface and completely destroyed entire regional ecosystems not once, but several times. During Ice Ages winters were longer and more severe and ice sheets grew to tremendous size, accumulating to thicknesses of up to 8,000 feet!. They moved slowly from higher elevations to lower-- driven by gravity and their tremendous weight. They left in their wake altered river courses, flattened landscapes, and along the margins of their farthest advance, great piles of glacial debris.\n\nDuring the last 3 million years glaciers have at one time or another covered about 29% of Earth's land surface or about 17.14 million square miles (44.38 million sq. km.) . What did not lay beneath ice was a largely cold and desolate desert landscape, due in large part to the colder, less-humid atmospheric conditions that prevailed.\n\nDuring the Ice Age summers were short and winters were brutal. Animal life and especially plant life had a very tough time of it. Thanks to global warming, that has all now changed, at least temporarily.\n\nThje maximum CO2 level was 2% over 2.5 million yrs back, at least scientists say that!!
559593
For a long time, people around the Earth have been spending lots and lots of money to send robotic equipment to study other planets in our Solar System.  Several have sent back such surprising results - oh, the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, and the colors of Neptune and Pluto!\n\nSome of the results also describe to us what the 'greenhouse effect" causes on other planets.  Unfortunately, when we see the results here on Earth, we presume that such a thing cannot happen here.\n\nWell, it can, and it does, and it has.\n\nFor rasons dealing largely with control of existing industrial resources, cost of investment, and just plain political power, people have made quite a campaign out of denying that global warming is taking place.  Their talk largely just adds to the hot air in the atmosphere.\n\nThe last Great Ice Age was more than 20 millenia ago.  Scientists studying that epoch say that carbon dioxide, particulates in the atmosphere, and a periodic change in the angle of the Earth's relationship to the sun all had a role to play - as perhaps did a major cycle of sunspot activity.  (That's just a guess by solar specialists but they like the idea a lot.)\n\nHowever, the physical evidence from the Great Ice Age is pretty conclusive.  Atmospheric components in ice left over from those days tell the tale.  And one of the great triggers of the last major Ice Age was particulate matter in the atmosphere - what some scientists decades ago warned would occur in a "nuclear winter" after The Bomb went off.  Everywhere.\n\nCarbon dioxide was relatively low in the atmospheric content - both during and at the end of the Great Ice Age.\n\nOne of the best arguments in favor of the effects of carbon dioxide on "global warming" is what we can tell happened to the planet when it got COLDER.  Besides various physical and naural events such as tiny alterations in the incidence of the sun's rays on the planet (that is, the angle at which they struck the atmosphere), we can track the history of stuff in the air that changed things.\n\nIn the pre-Industrial era, the only times that would happen were when NATURAL EVENTS took place - such as immense volcanic eruptions.  Those events combined with a periodic "wobble" in the Earth to create the last Little Ice Age, which affected Europe from around the time of Elizabeth I through the American Revolution.  \n\nSo it is appropriate to ask questions about the NATURAL events that might contribute now to global warming and the shrinking of ice caps.  But it is inappropriate to state that the byproducts of industrialized activities of humans, on a scale never before seen on the planet, cannot influence global weather and atmospheric conditions.\n\nYES, this is a big planet.  Yes, the forces at work are so massive they dwarf the puny efforts of humans - just ask any ship's captain, whether of a supertanker or a dinghy.  But NO, there has never before in all of history been anything equal to the cumulative effects of what humans do across the planet daily to spew heat, gases, and pollutants into the air through UNNATURAL means.  And for the cynics, let's remember that if in olden days all the dinosaurs on Earth had all farted at the same time, the methane they produced would not equal one day's worth of carbon dioxide emissions from industry today.  So leave that alone, once and for all.\n\nPart of the problem is that people think the byproducts of their actions are UNNATURAL.  In the sense that they result from human industrial functions, yes, they are not direct products of nature.  But in the sense that thse are an element of our natural world and we must see the emissions affecting that world, they ARE a part of "Nature."\n\nThe ONLY DIFFERENCE is that as a result we humans actually do own some sort of control over nature.  We can change the way that we influence natural processes.  And by the way - the various global attempts to do so wou
448371
Yes, it's a climate thing.
157311
oo  i could see that, but i also would think that the government would be involved. \n\n maybe it is some sick experiment.. eack!!
424933
This is caused by global warming which means that the increased levels of CO2 in our atmosphere is like a thick blanket it is trapping in the heat. The hole in the ozone layer has nothing to do with it. The hole in the ozone layer is over the ice caps and is melting them causing rising water levels, but not a climate change.
66051
Yes, among other gases.  See the link below.
294234
it would seem logical that it would.  everyting in nature seems to go in cycles, wouldn't this be the ultimate in recycling?  everything back to where it begun?  it makes sense to me , but sadly not yet backed up by empirical evidence, not yet anyway...
460607
First things first,\n\nI am a geologist, and I do not believe that global warming is caused by man's activities (anthrogenic), so you will hear some of what you need for your debate.  You may find that there are many scientists who do not subscibe to the anthrogenic "theory", despite what they teach in the classroom. \n\nFirst, the Earth is in an interglacial period which we entered approximately 10,000 years ago, the end of the last Ice Age.\n\nSecond, the Earth had a dramatic cooling during historic times, starting approximately 600 to 800 CE and ending approximately in the Mid 19th Century though some researchers are placing the re-emergence of the warming closer to the end of the 19th Century.\n\nThird, although weather measurements were standardized in the Mid 19th Century with the adoption of the SI units of measurements, instrumentation and permanent data stations were slower to evolve.  In other words accuracy and precision in measurements can not be documented for most of the historic record.  \n\nOther factors complicating Global Warming:\n1). the Carbon Cycle can not be adequately quantified \n2). the computer models do not take descrepency of the Carbon Cycle into account, therefore the models are NOT calibrated (although the modeler's will vehemently deny this fact)\n3) other influences such as reduction in solar radation natural volcanism, and even yearly forest fires are ignored.\n4) ignores the fact that although some warming is taking place in the Arctic, Antarctica is exhibitinhg many areas of colder temperatures \n5)Finally my pet peeve about the increased CO2 curve shown in every debate, the famous "hockey stick"...The monitoring station on Moana Loa is on top of an active volcano, a source of naturally occuring CO2.  Until they correlate this data to any increase or decrease in the volcanic activity on Moana Loa the data are suspect.\n\n\nI hope this helps...Check out junkscience.com for more information.
62409
It is Global Warming.  Geologically speaking we are still coming out of the last ice age.  We are on in a natural cycle which has been accerated by pollution.
562178
Global warming is the term used to describe how the average temperature of the planet is going up. No one denies that the temperature is, in fact, going up. Therefore, no one denies that global warming is a fact.\n\nHowever, according to studies of Antarctic ice, the average temperature of the planet has been rising for 6,000 years, which is well before the Industrial Revolution of 150 years ago. This proves that global warming is not caused by man. In that time, however, the rate of temperature rise has increased, which means that the actions of humanity probably has worsened the situation.\n\nThe critical facts about global warming are these:\n\nWhat are the effects of global warming going to be, and how can we prepare for them? Currently, no model of global atmospheric projection has shown itself to accurately predict to any degree the general weather patterns of the Earth (such as the number and ferocity of hurricanes). Until we come up with an accurate way of predicting the effects of global warming, preparing for them will be difficult and based upon conjectures, which are a difficult sell to taxpayers.\n\nWhat can be done to limit the effect of humanity on global warming in the future WITHOUT putting a major damper on economic growth and development, especially in developing nations? For example, all nations could agree to stop driving vehicles that use internal combustion engines, but to do so at once would devastate the economies of many nations. However, other options, such as diverting tax funds to subsidize the development of alternative-energy propulsion for vehicles, would accelerate the advent of such earth-friendly technology.\n\nAll in all, because of the massive stakes involved when discussing global warming (and the subsequent misinformation flying around about it), many people are confused as to the facts about it. I was hoping to be as informative and unbiased as possible.\n\nPlease let me know what you think!
635664
I think Al Gore jumps on the warming evidence and assumes the cause.  They just discovered that Antarctica was once tropic.  This planet has gone through ice ages and warming trends over and over.  So far I have seen no proof whatsoever that the current warming trend is anything more sinister than what has happened so many times.  I have looked to find it, expecting to find it, and couldn't find a link.  If someone has one (not a person saying 'it is caused by industrialization' but actual proof of that) I would love to see it.\n\nHaving said that, I think Gore legitimately believes global warming is something that can and should be stopped.  To that extent I believe he is genuine.\n\nWould he make a good President?  - No.
631101
The Earth is a balanced system. Changes within certain parameters may sway the system this way or that, but won't throw it out of balance completely. \nSo yes, the Earth can compensate for changes caused by global warming, but only to a certain extent.
72123
It is indeed a threat...But so is global warming....have you noticed the weird weather lately?