Porkinator wrote:From what I have heard about this movie is they leave out a lot of studies that shows just the oppisite. It only shows one side of the argument. Take it with a grain of salt.
Better yet a 50 lb bag of salt..
Unless you have drank the koolaide, Global Warming isn't even up for debate anymore, it's not a question of 'whether or not' in the scientific community, only a question of 'when' the effects will be seen the most.
MYTH: The science behind the theory of global warming is too uncertain to draw conclusions useful to policy makers.
FACT: The primary scientific debate is about how much and how fast, rather than whether, additional warming will occur as a result of human-produced GHG emissions. While skeptics like to emphasize the lower end of warming projections, uncertainty actually applies to both ends of the spectrum--the climate could change even more dramatically than most models predict. Finally, in matters other than climate change, policy decisions based on uncertain information are made routinely by governments to ensure against undesirable outcomes. In the case of global warming, scientists have given society an early warning on its possibly dangerous, irreversible and widespread impacts.
MYTH: Global warming can't be happening, since winters have been getting colder.
FACT: Winters have been getting warmer. Measurements show that Earth's climate has warmed overall over the past century, in all seasons, and in most regions. The skeptics mislead the public when they bill the winter of 2003-2004 as record cold in the northeastern United States. That winter was only the 33rd coldest in the region since records began in 1896. Furthermore, a single spell of cold weather in one small region is no indication of cooling of the global climate, which refers to a long-term average over the entire planet.
MYTH: Satellite measurements of temperature over the past two decades show a much smaller warming in the atmosphere than is measured by thermometers at the surface. This contradicts global warming predictions based on climate models.
FACT: Recent research has corrected problems that led to underestimates of the warming trend in earlier analyses of satellite data. The new results show an atmospheric warming trend slightly larger than at the surface, exactly as models predict.
MYTH: The global warming over the past century is nothing unusual. For example, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), roughly from A.D. 1000 to 1400, was warmer than the 20th century. This indicates the global warming we are experiencing now is part of a natural cycle.
FACT: Ten independent scientific studies all have found a large 20th-century warming trend compared to temperature changes over the past millennium or two. Uncertainty exists as to exactly how warm the present is compared to the MWP. Some studies have received valid criticism for possibly underestimating the magnitude of longer-lasting, century-scale temperature changes, such as the warming during the MWP. However, other studies, using different methods, still find no evidence of any period during the last 2,000 years that was warmer than the 1990s. Most importantly, any uncertainty about whether the present is warmer than the MWP has little effect on the finding that humans likely have caused most of the warming over the past 50 years. A separate body of studies has provided the main evidence for this finding. (See the Myth on causes of warming.)
MYTH: Human activities contribute only a small fraction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, far too small to have a significant effect on the concentration of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere.
FACT: Before the Industrial Revolution, the amount of CO2 emitted from large natural sources closely matched the amount that was removed through natural processes. That balance has now been upset by human activities, which since the Industrial Revolution have put twice as much CO2 into the atmosphere as can be readily removed by the oceans and forests. This has resulted in the accumulation of CO2 to the highest levels in 420,000 years.
MYTH: The Earth's warming is caused by natural factors like increased sunlight and sunspots or decreased cosmic rays, not by greenhouse gases (GHGs).
FACT: Modeling studies indicate that most of the warming over the past several decades was probably caused by the increase in human-produced GHGs. Climate models have difficulty reproducing the observed temperature changes over the past 150 years unless they account for the increase in GHGs as well as natural factors, such as sunlight and volcanic eruptions, and changes in the amount of human-produced sulfate particles, which cool the planet. Satellite measurements of the intensity of sunlight exhibit little or no trend over the past 25 years, when there was rapid warming on Earth. The purported correlations between the amount of cosmic rays and Earth's temperature are the result of flawed analysis methods.
MYTH: The warming observed during the past century was caused by urbanization (urban heat island effect).
FACT: Urbanization does increase temperatures locally, affecting thermometer readings in certain areas. But the temperature data used in trend analyses are adjusted to remove any bias from urbanization. In any case, urbanization has an insignificant effect on global temperature trends.
