What if global warming was a serious problem with different north American forests?

Answer 1

Many people think that the current phase of global warming was directly caused by human beings who have invented such things as cement, electric power, internal combustion engines and furnaces and water heaters which use oil or gas as fuels.

Cement is made by burning limestone, a process which generates so much carbon dioxide gas (CO2) that it has become one of the major pollutants of the Earth's atmosphere. Then the cement is used to make concrete to create huge and ever-growing cities with their associated urban infrastructure such as buildings, tunnels, roads, railways, sea ports, airports, etc.

Electric power does not arise naturally: it must always be generated. Apart from the relatively small amount of electricity that is currently generated using river dams and waterfalls or using wind-generators, seawater wave-generators or solar cells, one of the main ways to generate electric power at present is to burn fossil-based fuels such as coal, oil or gas. Such fuel burning is another major source of pollution of the Earth's atmosphere. Human beings use internal combustion engines in vehicles such as cars, trucks, trains, ships and airplanes to travel about, both within and between those cities. They also use furnaces and water heaters, which use oil or gas as fuels, to heat the buildings in those cities. Even air conditioning systemsthat are used to cool buildings must use electricity, as must electric lighting and all the computer and communications systems we now use.

The theory that global warming is caused by humans depends on four main factors:

# The production of cement to make concrete produces a massive amount of pollution, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), which goes straight into the Earth's atmosphere.

# The burning of fossil-based fuels - both to generate electricity and to fuel the internal combustion engines in cars, trucks, ships and airplanes - produces a massive amount of atmospheric pollution, not only carbon dioxide (CO2) but carbon monoxide (CO) and various oxides of nitrogen (NOX). The CO and NOX produced in internal combustion engines can be reduced considerably by using cleaner fuels and catalytic converters in cars and trucks but catalytic converters are not currently available for the jet engines as currently used in airplanes.

Nevertheless the CO2, produced in vast quantities by all coal-burning electricity generation stations and by all oil- or gas-based heating systems and fuel-burning engines, remains a major problem.

Those two factors - the production of cement and the burning of fossil fuels - create much more carbon dioxide pollution in our atmosphere than the Earth's natural processes can remove. One of the main natural processes for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere depends on having large forests of trees because trees "breathe in" carbon dioxide and "breathe out" oxygen.

# The area of natural forests on the Earth is being greatly reduced by humans who destroy whole rain-forests by burning down the trees to make big fields in which they can plant crops for use as food and fuel. That burning itself produces massive amounts of atmosphere-polluting CO2. Unless this deforestation is stopped there will be too few trees left to convert even naturally-produced carbon dioxide into oxygen. (All animals which breath in oxygen must breathe out CO2 and that is the naturally-produced CO2.)

# One consequence of creating massive cities with buildings, tunnels, roads, etc. is that all the concrete that must be used to create the urban infrastructure absorbs and stores the heat from the Sun. As a result the temperature within cities is significantly warmer than in the surrounding countryside.

Those are just four of the reasons why some people say that the current phase of global warming was caused by human beings.

First of all, it isn't happening. If it ever was, it ended 9 years ago. Temperatures have remained below the 1998 high ever since then, and are expected to decrease even more this year. Second, recent research casts doubts on the accuracy of the "official temperature record" (go to www.surfacestations.org), and it may be that the ACTUAL temperature has not increased at all over the last 40 years. In any event, it did not increase nearly as rapidly as the "observed" temperatures increased. Third, if and to the extent that global warming was occurring, it was part of a completely natural climate cycle. Three warming periods have occurred in the last 4000 years - the Minoan Warm Period 3000 years ago, the Roman Warm Period 2000 years ago, and the Medieval Warm Period 1000 years ago. All of these occurred long before SUVs and electricity and therefore must have been completely natural in origin. Note that the current warm period exactly coincides with the interval of the natural cycle that cause the last three warm periods. Moreover, all three achieved temperatures higher than anything seen in the "current" warm period (which, as explained in the first paragraph, isn't "current" anymore). So what we have here is a completely natural cycle that is perfectly capable of explaining the existence, level, and rate of the current warming without resorting to any man-made bogeyman such as the burning of fossil fuels. Why, then, is it necessary to blame mankind? There were some rising temperatures in the past that happened every couple 100 years and now would be the time for that but still there has never been such a drastic increase in temperature.

All the pollution we cause burns holes in the ozone layer which is letting in extreme heat waves from the Sun that normally wouldn't get in and then it gets trapped in here. Also smog ruins the Earth's natural ability to control this.

So, mostly, yes, it is all our fault. The chemical CFCs and the carbon dioxide from cars, trucks, factories etc. Gases. Pollutants. Things that are affecting our ecosystem. <><><>

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