Some scientists have opined the climate is going to be warmer on the earth (global warming) but as I see this year is colder, rainier and snowier in most of the lands of Northern Hemisphere than the past.
Unless you live in the PNW, which is warmer with more sun than normal. Global warming is better thought of as climate change.
Yes, this. In tha past few months I've been taking note of how many poor coinages are floating around that misrepresent what we mean when we say what we say. This is one of them.
In the meantime, Australia is burning! http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2014/01/06/22202191-as-us-freezes-heatwave-prompts-severe-fire-warnings-in-australia Don't be fooled by the climate change deniers who would take a shift in the polar wind stream and use it to falsely proclaim global warming is not happening. Weather doesn't equal climate. Related, yes, but direct one to one correlation, not that simple.
They changed it to 'climate change' years ago, because of just this reason. Now, when it's colder than normal, they can blame 'climate change' and when it's hotter than normal, they can claim 'climate change'. It's a nice catch all to make the global warming people feel more confident in their precious money-factory cause.
We're having a very unusual winter. No snow yet, temperatures above 0 (32 degrees), lots of rain. On the other hand, the last two winters were incredibly snowy and cold...
You know that 99.9% of environmental scientists believe in climate change, right? The other 0.1% are funded by people like the Koch brothers.
OK fine, it's more like 97%, but it just shows that the overwhelming majority of scientists do believe in climate change caused by humans.
Just out of curiosity for those that don't believe climate scientists or choose to believe the couple that are on Exxon's payroll, what evidence would you expect to see if global climate heating was actually occurring? And how relevant is a the transient dip in the polar wind stream (or vortex - causing the current cold snap) when the southern hemisphere and other areas of the northern hemisphere are not experiencing excessive cooling?
Since we live on planet Earth, climate change is inevitable, right? It's just that, as @thirdwind put it, whether or not to believe humans have contributed to/caused it. It's difficult to dispute some facts like the arctic shrinkage and the Gulf Stream slowing down.
So what is the current age of the Earth? How long has the Earth been experiencing weather cycles? Expressed as a percentage, how much data do we have in relation to the billions of years the Earth has been quietly not giving a flip about humanity? My calculator doesn't go that small. Truth is, humanity has no data, for all intents and purposes. Earth has heated, Earth has cooled, the ozone holes grow, the ozone holes shrink. It is naive to think we have any clue what our planet is doing.
There is good evidence to show that, on average, temperatures have gone up in the last few decades, sea levels have gone up, the amount of ice has gone down, and CO2 levels have gone up. CO2 is known to trap heat, and climate models show that the amount of CO2 is correlated to the surface temperature. Since a lot of human activities put out CO2, it's very likely that humans are at least partly to blame for the increase in the average temperature.
In Canada, the conservative government, has shut down numerous Department of Fisheries libraries and labs. Basically pulled a Farhenheit 451 on the scientists involved. Certainly one of the things Fisheries does is track ocean temperatures and conditions. Canada has done an outstanding job at muzzling its scientists through bullying and other nasty methods. Harper is bought and paid for by big business interests. This is so we can carry on digging gargantuan amounts of crude out of the tar sands for as long as possible without too many people complaining.
Actually, yes, yes and there's more to it. Climate change is inevitable, yes. The narrative after scientific denial began to fail on several levels changed to, it's natural, humans aren't the cause, and now that that denial is hard to maintain the narrative is, we can't do anything because we don't know what to do. The latest round of denial coming from the right wing voices in the US because there is a record cold snap are simply unrestrained back sliders. Even GW Bush acknowledged climate warming near the end of his term. And the thinning of Greenland's ice mass and retreat of its glaciers, the disappearance of mountain glaciers in the tropical regions that threaten water supplies of a couple billion people, permafrost melting, sharp curve upward of atmospheric CO2 levels, increasing ocean acidity, massive die offs of coral reefs, and shifting animal and insect habitats toward the poles.
So because you don't understand the science or how the scientists determine global heating, it must not be knowable. Interesting.
It's true that we don't know with certainty, and that there are limitations to what we understand about the processes involved, as well as to the breadth of data, but what we do know points us in one direction, and we can only act on the information we have at the current time. Doing nothing because we lack a complete understanding or because our data isn't exhaustive doesn't make much sense. A lot of human activity would cease by that standard.
I haven't any certain information about the age of the earth but just believe (scientifically) , It seems that the earth is younger than Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune and is older than Venus and Mercury. Also I have a theory about exceptional water and oxygen on the earth. In fact, I have discovered this based on an exceptional event which happened for Earth a few million years ago and if not, it was a planet as Mars or others solar system planets, empty of water and oxygen.
If the human population addresses the threat of rapid climate change, think of all the future sci-fi books about apocalyptic climate disasters we won't see.
Fight on Wrey. That's a lifelong endeavor. Checking the years most common misconceptions should be like the first thing each person does in a new year haha. To answer @JJ's question though, the earth is approximately 4.54 billion years. This was established from some spectacularly durable minerals called zircon that managed to survive that long. The other rocky bodies in the solar system formed roughly around the same time, give or take a few million years. This is estimated from dating meteorites from the astroid belt (also mars) that represent the primordial makings of our solar system. There are certain little crystals found in meteorites that would only form early on in the evolution of the solar system (chondrules), so we know the dates we get from these samples roughly represents the age of the rocky planets/ debris. Gas giants are a whole other ordeal that I don't know about. Regarding what information we do have: We have excellent atmospheric data with good resolution from ice core samples, but these only date back a couple thousand years I think. Minuscule really compared to everything else. But we have more tricks up our sleeves! One is fluid inclusions (note: fluid in this case refers to gas or liquid) inside minerals. Even micron-sized fluid inclusions can give us information about past atmospheres dating back millions and in some case billions of years. This data is of course subject to much wider errors and the resolution is much poorer. But the point is we don't just have data from the past couple thousand years, we do have access to samples of ancient atmosphere. Oh we'll always find new ways to predict the end of days. We always seem to find them
