What are the 3 major misconceptions about global warming?

Answer 1

The uncertainty of climate change because of global warming is much greater than previously thought, and as a result, policymakers should adopt a robust, adaptive-decision strategy to cope with potential consequences, researchers at the University of Illinois say.

There is uncertainty about what monetary value to assign to the costs and benefits of various policies to reduce global warming. And yet the influence of uncertainty in policymaker's decisions is ignored in most studies of the issue. The authors try to explicitly incorporate the effect of uncertainty in the choice of global warming abatement policies. The approach they develop draws on the emerging literature on investment under uncertainty - in particular, that on the option-valuation approach. Their numerical applications focus on the Cline's (1992) analysis of global warming, but it may be applied to a range of global warming analyses. First, they assess whether it is optimal to implement Cline's strategy of limiting global warming today, or whether it should be postponed, and for how long. Then, they identify the optimal policy to be implemented today for different levels of uncertainty about the costs and benefits of policies to reduce global warming.

Answer 2

1. Carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) is the main cause of global warming.
2. Deforestation is the other main cause, because trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
3. We can still slow and maybe stop global warming by changing to renewable energy (solar, wind, water, hydro, tidal and wave, geothermal, ocean thermal, biomass and biofuel) to generate electricity.

Answer 3

There are different points of view on global warming, as there are on many contentious subjects, but from a scientific point of view the major misconceptions about global warming held by a significant proportion of the population are:

• The world is not really warming; if it was warming during the last century, this has slowed down or stopped.
• Scientists do not really know what causes global warming.
• Humans could not possibly have such an enormous influence as to change the course of nature like this.
• If global warming is happening, there is nothing we can do now to slow down or stop the process.

Answer 4

First Misconception: Isn't there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not?

Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer reviewed article written on global warming in the last ten years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero. The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small number of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here is what it said according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as a theory rather than fact.

This has happened before. After the US Surgeon General's report. One of their memos leaked 4 years ago. They said, "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public's mind." But have they succeeded? You'll remember that there were 928 peer reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. Over the last fourteen years they listed a sample of 636. More than half of them said, "Well, we are not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem." So no wonder people are confused.

• Hey! What did you find out? Working for who? .
• Scientists have an independent obligation to respect and present the truth as they see it.
• "Why do you directly contradict yourself in the testimony you're giving about this scientific question?"
• "That last paragraph in that section was not a paragraph which I wrote. That was added to my testimony."
• "If they force you to change a scientific conclusion it is a form of scientific fraud by them."
• "I've seen scientists who were persecuted, ridiculed, deprived of jobs, income simply because the facts they discovered led them to an inconvenient truth that they insisted on telling."
• "He worked for the American Petroleum Institute and in January of 2001 he was put by the president in charge of environmental policy. He received a memo from the EPA that warned about global warming. He had no scientific training whatsoever, but he took it upon himself to overrule the scientists. I want to know what this guy's handwriting looks like. This is the memo from the EPA. These are his actual pen strokes. He said, "No, you can't say this. This is just speculation." This was embarrassing to the Whitehouse. So this fellow resigned a few days later. The day after he resigned he went to work for Exxon-Mobil.
• You know more than a hundred years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote this: "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends on him not understanding it."

The second misconception: Do we have to choose between the economy and the environment? This is a big one. A lot of people say we do. I was trying to convince the first Bush administration to go to the Earth Summit. They organized a big White House conference to say, "We're on top of this." One of these viewgraphs caught my attention and I want to talk about it for a minute. Here is the choice we have to make according to this group. We have here a scale that balances two different things. On one side, we have gold bars. Mm. Don't they look good! I'd just like to have some of those gold bars. On the other side of the scale we have. The Entire Planet! Hmm? I think this is a false choice for two reasons.

Number One: if we don't have a planet.

Number Two: if we do the right thing, then we are going to create a lot of wealth and we are going to create a lot of jobs, because doing the right thing moves us forward.

I've probably given this slide show a thousand times. I've tried to identify all those things in people's minds that serve as obstacles to them understanding this. Whenever I feel like I've identified an obstacle, I try to take it apart, roll it away, remove it, blow it up. I set myself a goal: communicate this really clearly. The only way I know to do it is city by city, person by person, family by family. And I have faith that pretty soon enough minds are changed that we cross a threshold.

Let me give you an example of the wrong way to balance the economy and the environment. One part of this issue involves automobiles. Japan has mileage standards up here. Europe plans to pass Japan. Our allies in Australia and Canada are leaving us behind. Here's where we are. There is a reason for it. They say that we can't protect the environment too much without threatening the economy and threatening the auto makers, because auto makers in China might come in and just steal all our market. Well, here is where China's auto mileage standards are now. We can't sell our cars in China today because we don't meet China's mileage standard.

California has taken some initiative to have higher mileage cars sold in California. The auto companies have sued California to prevent this law from taking effect because as they point out, eleven years from now this would mean California would have to have cars for sale that are as efficient eleven years from now as China's are today: clearly too onerous a provision to comply with. Is this helping our companies to succeed? Actually, if you look at who's doing well in the world it's the companies that are building more efficient cars. Our companies are in deep trouble.

Third misconception: If we accept that this problem is real, maybe it is just too big to do anything about.

There are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem. That's what I would like to finish with: the fact that we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem. We've got to do a lot of things, not just one. By increasing end-use efficiency we can remove global warming pollution that would otherwise be put into the atmosphere.

• More efficient electrical appliances
• Higher mileage cars
• Other transport efficiency
• Renewable technology
• Carbon capture sequestration

They all add up and pretty soon we are below our 1970 emission. We have everything we need, save perhaps political will. In America, political will is a renewable resource.

We have the ability to do this. Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.

Answer 5

• polar ice caps melting
• habitats being destroyed as some animals can only survive in certain temperatures
• drought

hope this helps :)

Answer 6

How are We to explain the melting of all of Our Earth's Glaciers.

Acidification of Our Oceans is next on the List.

Answer 7

the climate is changing