The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is comprised of some of the top scientists in the world, last year released a report stating that with 90% certainty humans are to blame for Global Warming. Specifically, the increase in emissions of greenhouse gases are to blame for the increase in temperatures, threatening our planet.

Fossil fuels like methane and carbon dioxide trap heat near the surface, a process known as the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is a natural phenomenon, but human activities, like the burning of fossil fuels, can pour enormous volumes of these gases into the atmosphere, raising the planet's temperature and destabilizing the climate.

"The report found it was "likely" -- "more likely than not" in some cases -- that manmade greenhouse gases have contributed to hotter days and nights, and more of them, more killer heat waves than before, heavier rainfall more often, major droughts in more regions, stronger and more frequent cyclones and "increased incidence" of extremely high sea levels.

The report noted that 11 of the last 12 years have ranked among the 12 warmest years on record with the oceans absorbing more than 80 percent of the heat added to the climate system. Add in the melt-off of glaciers and sea ice and sea levels are rising.

The IPCC predicted global temperature increases of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.2 to 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 and sea levels to rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 and 58 centimeters) by the end of the century.

An additional 3.9-7.8 inches (10-20 centimeters) are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues," the report stated."

While 90% is not completely conclusive, it is very evident from the data gathered that there have been extreme increases in the amount of carbon dioxide found in the environment over the past 30 years. Studying the carbon dioxide levels in ice cores shows that while CO2 concentration is cyclical, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of CO2 found in these ice cores that is well outside of the range of "normal cyclical fluctuations".

According to the The European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA)

"Levels of CO2 are now 27% percent higher than at any point in the past 650,000 years, according to research into Antarctic ice cores.

The study, which provides more evidence of human interference in the climate system, pushes back our greenhouse gas record by 210,000 years and now encompasses four glacial cycles."

This disproves the theory that these are "cyclical CO2 fluctuations". Any person that has taken Stats 101 can tell you that being this many Standard Deviations outside of the Mean indicates there is something anomalous about the CO2 levels we are currently experiencing. Since the increase in fossil fuel consumption unmistakably increases the amount of CO2 found in the atmosphere, and increases in CO2 unmistakably are directly correlated to increases in temperature, one must draw the conclusion that Humans Are Responsible for Global Warming

""The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice-mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that is not due to known natural causes alone," said the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—a group of hundreds of scientists and representatives of 113 governments.

The phrase "very likely" translates to a more than 90 percent certainty that global warming is caused by man's burning of fossil fuels. That was the strongest conclusion to date, making it nearly impossible to say natural forces are to blame."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2007/02/01/ AR2007020100395_pf.html

"Over eight out of ten American climate scientists believe that human activity contributes to global warming, according to a new survey released by the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University. The researchers also report that belief in human-induced warming has more than doubled since the last major survey of American climate scientists in 1991. However, the survey finds that scientists are still debating the dynamics and dangers of global warming, and only three percent trust newspaper or television coverage of climate change."

http://stats.org/stories/2008/ global_warming_survey_apr23_08.html

Global warming is real, we have almost certainly helped cause it, and I'm sorry, but the dangers are too great and most likely too near to sit around arguing down every last person that wishes to keep their head in the sand in order to continue living their absolutely unsustainable lifestyle. There really isn't time to wait around, while the icecaps melt, the Gulf Stream gets disrupted, and the fuel supply runs low, for every last person to get out of their Hummer and realize that if you want the world to be any kind of decent for human habitation, for your children and their's, your lifestyle needs to change.

The US Government has acknowledged for the first time that man-made pollution is largely to blame for global warming.

This comes from the the Wikipedia article on Global Warming. I've included the mentioned sources at the bottom:

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The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the hundred years ending in 2005.[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations"[1] via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.[2][3]

These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least thirty scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[9][10]

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[1] http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/ AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf

Summary for Policymakers (PDF). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007-02-05). Retrieved on 2007-02-02. “The updated hundred-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74 °C [0.56 °C to 0.92 °C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the TAR of 0.6 °C [0.4 °C to 0.8 °C].”

[2] http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/ AR4WG1_Print_Ch09.pdf

Hegerl, Gabriele C.; et al. (2007-05-07). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 690. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Retrieved on 2007-05-20. “Recent estimates (Figure 9.9) indicate a relatively small combined effect of natural forcings on the global mean temperature evolution of the seconds half of the twentieth century, with a small net cooling from the combined effects of solar and volcanic forcings”

[3] http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/104/10/ 3713.pdf

Ammann, Caspar; et al. (2007-04-06). "Solar influence on climate during the past millennium: Results from ransient simulations with the NCAR Climate Simulation Model" (PDF). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104 (10): 3713–3718. doi:10.1073/pnas.0605064103. PMID 17360418. “However, because of a lack of interactive ozone, the model cannot fully simulate features discussed in (44)." "While the NH temperatures of the high-scaled experiment are often colder than the lower bound from proxy data, the modeled decadal-scale NH surface temperature for the medium-scaled case falls within the uncertainty range of the available temperature reconstructions. The medium-scaled simulation also broadly reproduces the main features seen in the proxy records." "Without anthropogenic forcing, the 20th century warming is small. The simulations with only natural forcing components included yield an early 20th century peak warming of ≈0.2 °C (≈1950 AD), which is reduced to about half by the end of the century because of increased volcanism.”

[4] The 2001 joint statement was signed by the scientific academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Malaysia, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK. The 2005 statement added Japan, Russia, and the U.S. The 2007 statement added Mexico, and South Africa. Professional societies include American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Institute of Physics, American Astronomical Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London, Geological Society of America, American Chemical Society, and Engineers Australia.

[5] http://royalsociety.org/ displaypagedoc.asp?id=13619

The Science Of Climate Change. Royal Society (May 2001). Retrieved on 2008-01-04.

[6] http://royalsociety.org/ displaypagedoc.asp?id=20742

Joint science academies' statement: Global response to climate change. Royal Society (June 2005). Retrieved on 2008-01-04.

[7] http://www.pik-potsdam.de/aktuelles/ archiv/aktuelle/dateien/ G8_Academies%20Declaration.pdf

Joint science academies' statement on growth and responsibility: sustainability, energy efficiency and climate protection. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (May 2007). Retrieved on 2008-01-04.

[8] http://www.nationalpost.com/news/ story.html?id=164002

Don't fight, adapt. National Post (December 2007). Retrieved on 2007-11-18.

[9] http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/ downloaddoc.asp?id=1630

A guide to facts and fictions about climate change. Royal Society (March 2005). Retrieved on 2007-11-18. “"However, the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change agree on the main points"”

[10] http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/ full/306/5702/1686

Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. Science Magazine (December 2004). Retrieved on 2008-01-04.

It's all around us... plain as that. Look at all the different gases we release into the Atmospher, Nucuelar, Arisol, Carbon Dioxide, and Other products created by Humans. If we didn't use so much of these products we would not be in this state of crisis. If we limited are resources our gas prices would stay at low rates, if we were outside and exercising then we would use lets energy at the houses and cut down on Nucuelar power, stop driving so much start walking cut down on exhast fuems which become our nice Carbon Dioxide problem, and stop cuting down the whole rain forests because no more plants to absorb the carbon dioxide.

what???

i am glad fuel prices have gone up it makes you think next time you just want to drive around. carbon dioxide is a gas yes that is common yes. but carbon dioxide kills us and it kills most other living things. other than plants which need it and if we keep choping down the trees the crabon dioxide will increase and if we have more carbon dioxide than oxygen then we will die!!! and i am glad they don't dig for oil anymore!!!!

have you seen what it looks like??? big ugly holes in the ground which shouldn't be there!!!!! the fuel and gasoline is reacking our plant by the looks of it, the smell of it and the sea levels. i am in australia!!! which is a island and in the last 20 years it has been covered by water because of the rise of sea levels probably in the next 20 years it will be smaller then smaller every year we keep contributing to the increse of the gas! the ice is melting which is because it has gotten hotter and that is because of the carbon dioxide. and there isn't enough plants to keep it under control. the balance of the gases has changed which is a bad thing. if you are a scientis you should understand that if something is unblanced it will fail or become harmful. like the food chain!!! if there is an unbalance then we are screwed. that is the way of the universe. by fuel and oil we are creatating an unbalance in the universe!!!! and man is therefore th blame!!! our technogly is getting better yes but our life style is getting worse. which is pretty bad if you think about it. i mean yes we had tv's and cars and stuff like that but we are creating plastic which can't be reused. plastic is killing our animals in the ocean which is a big sorce of our food. also our life style is getting worse because of the increase in weight. our bodys are becoming fatter. that is because of our life style. if you are overweight than your diet is unbalanced and an unbalance is bad. bad for you kids because they could have heart problems which inturn can be past down. which inturn will lead us to being a worse world in the next 30 years.

BALANCE IS EVERYTHING!!!!!!!

the key t success as they say is a balance! there fore our increase of carbon dioxide is bad because it creates an unbalance in the atmopher!!!!!!

and for scientist to not under stand that then there teachers must not have done a good job!!!! for a sceince you have to think realsiticly and you ovisly arent!!! you can't see the whole picture which inurn is your own fault. you must be very closed minded!!!!

it doesn't take thousands of doctuments to point it out it just takes a good mind and and whole grasp on science and the world we live in today!!!!!!

so for you to say man did not do it you must be wrong! man were bulit to destory that is the reality. that is man that is how we were built!!!!!

Are humans responsible? I think the definition of responsible has something to do with affirmative response to something. If we did not cause global warming all together, we are surely not helping. Global warming has to do with near surface and water temperature. How can one say that we aren't causing that?

I live in Bakersfield Ca., one of the worst cities in America for smog and air pollution. During the day I cannot see the mountains that are only 24 miles away because of the smog. If you look straight up, you see a relatively blue sky, if you look outward, you see a belt of bright white light. It also is about as hot here as it is in Death Valley on a hot day. You leave Bakersfield in any direction and it's cooler. It's all because we sit in a sump of a valley that collects all of the smog from the cities north of us in higher regions of the valley. Every year it seems like, we get less and less rain, and there almost seems to never be an actual winter. It's sort of like fall, but a little cooler, the leaves are falling all winter... and then there's spring, when it gets extremely hot and then cooler, and then hot again, and cooler, and then hotter... etc forever.

I remember as a kid, only about 15 years ago, when it would freeze overnight and rain for days... We even had snow once... but that's only a memory now. It's been getting hotter every year.

If that's not proof enough for me, I don't know what is. So I at least blame how it is here on human activity.

Global warming though has been linked to so many things, and to some degree, is normal... but I'm sure we're not helping, and we won't be able to unless things really, really change... but they won't, so in that respect, we aren't "responsible" for global warming.

John Coleman, founder of The Weather Channel writes:

-You may want to give credit where credit is due to Al Gore and his global warming campaign the next time you fill your car with gasoline, because there is a direct connection between Global Warming and four dollar a gallon gas. It is shocking, but true, to learn that the entire Global Warming frenzy is based on the environmentalist’s attack on fossil fuels, particularly gasoline. All this big time science, international meetings, thick research papers, dire threats for the future; all of it, comes down to their claim that the carbon dioxide in the exhaust from your car and in the smoke stacks from our power plants is destroying the climate of planet Earth. What an amazing fraud; what a scam.

The future of our civilization lies in the balance.

That’s the battle cry of the High Priest of Global Warming Al Gore and his fellow, agenda driven disciples as they predicta calamitous outcome from anthropogenic global warming. According to Mr. Gore the polar ice caps will collapse and melt and sea levels will rise 20 feet inundating the coastal cities making 100 million of us refugees. Vice President Gore tells us numerous Pacific islands will be totally submerged and uninhabitable. He tells us global warming will disrupt the circulation of the ocean waters, dramatically changing climates, throwing the world food supply into chaos. He tells us global warming will turn hurricanes into super storms, produce droughts, wipe out the polar bears and result in bleaching of coral reefs. He tells us tropical diseases will spread to mid latitudes and heat waves will kill tens of thousands. He preaches to us that we must change our lives and eliminate fossil fuels or face the dire consequences. The future of our civilization is in the balance.

With a preacher’s zeal, Mr. Gore sets out to strike terror into us and our children and make us feel we are all complicit in the potential demise of the planet.

Here is my rebuttal.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

Through all history, Earth has shifted between two basic climate regimes: ice ages and what paleoclimatologists call “Interglacial periods”. For the past 10 thousand years the Earth has been in an interglacial period. That might well be called nature’s global warming because what happens during an interglacial period is the Earth warms up, the glaciers melt and life flourishes. Clearly from our point of view, an interglacial period is greatly preferred to the deadly rigors of an ice age. Mr. Gore and his crowd would have us believe that the activities of man have overwhelmed nature during this interglacial period and are producing an unprecedented, out of control warming.

Well, it is simply not happening. Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years. So, I ask Al Gore, where’s the global warming?

The cooling trend is so strong that recently the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge it. He speculated that nature has temporarily overwhelmed mankind’s warming and it may be ten years or so before the warming returns. Oh, really. We are supposed to be in a panic about man-made global warming and the whole thing takes a ten year break because of the lack of Sun spots. If this weren’t so serious, it would be laughable.

Now allow me to talk a little about the science behind the global warming frenzy. I have dug through thousands of pages of research papers, including the voluminous documents published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I have worked my way through complicated math and complex theories. Here’s the bottom line: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels. They don’t have any other issue. Carbon Dioxide, that’s it.

Hello Al Gore; Hello UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Your science is flawed; your hypothesis is wrong; your data is manipulated. And, may I add, your scare tactics are deplorable. The Earth does not have a fever. Carbon dioxide does not cause significant global warming.

The focus on atmospheric carbon dioxide grew out a study by Roger Revelle who was an esteemed scientist at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute. He took his research with him when he moved to Harvard and allowed his students to help him process the data for his paper. One of those students was Al Gore. That is where Gore got caught up in this global warming frenzy. Revelle’s paper linked the increases in carbon dioxide, CO2, in the atmosphere with warming. It labeled CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son Ralph, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

All the computer models, all of the other findings, all of the other angles of study, all come back to and are based on CO2 as a significant greenhouse gas. It is not.

Here is the deal about CO2, carbon dioxide. It is a natural component of our atmosphere. It has been there since time began. It is absorbed and emitted by the oceans. It is used by every living plant to trigger photosynthesis. Nothing would be green without it. And we humans; we create it. Every time we breathe out, we emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It is not a pollutant. It is not smog. It is a naturally occurring invisible gas.

Let me illustrate. I estimate that this square in front of my face contains 100,000 molecules of atmosphere. Of those 100,000 only 38 are CO2; 38 out of a hundred thousand. That makes it a trace component. Let me ask a key question: how can this tiny trace upset the entire balance of the climate of Earth? It can’t. That’s all there is to it; it can’t.

The UN IPCC has attracted billions of dollars for the research to try to make the case that CO2 is the culprit of run-away, man-made global warming. The scientists have come up with very complex creative theories and done elaborate calculations and run computer models they say prove those theories. They present us with a concept they call radiative forcing. The research organizations and scientists who are making a career out of this theory, keep cranking out the research papers. Then the IPCC puts on big conferences at exotic places, such as the recent conference in Bali. The scientists endorse each other’s papers, they are summarized and voted on, and voila, we are told global warming is going to kill us all unless we stop burning fossil fuels.

May I stop here for a few historical notes? First, the internal combustion engine and gasoline were awful polluters when they were first invented. And, both gasoline and automobile engines continued to leave a layer of smog behind right up through the 1960’s. Then science and engineering came to the environmental rescue. Better exhaust and ignition systems, catalytic converters, fuel injectors, better engineering throughout the engine and reformulated gasoline have all contributed to a huge reduction in the exhaust emissions from today’s cars. Their goal then was to only exhaust carbon dioxide and water vapor, two gases widely accepted as natural and totally harmless. Anyone old enough to remember the pall of smog that used to hang over all our cities knows how much improvement there has been. So the environmentalists, in their battle against fossil fuels and automobiles had a very good point forty years ago, but now they have to focus almost entirely on the once harmless carbon dioxide. And, that is the rub. Carbon dioxide is not an environmental problem; they just want you now to think it is.

Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures. By the way, before his death, Roger Revelle coauthored a paper cautioning that CO2 and its greenhouse effect did not warrant extreme countermeasures.

So now it has come down to an intense campaign, orchestrated by environmentalists claiming that the burning of fossil fuels dooms the planet to run-away global warming. Ladies and Gentlemen, that is a myth.

So how has the entire global warming frenzy with all its predictions of dire consequences, become so widely believed, accepted and regarded as a real threat to planet Earth? That is the most amazing part of the story.

To start with global warming has the backing of the United Nations, a major world force. Second, it has the backing of a former Vice President and very popular political figure. Third it has the endorsement of Hollywood, and that’s enough for millions. And, fourth, the environmentalists love global warming. It is their tool to combat fossil fuels. So with the environmentalists, the UN, Gore and Hollywood touting Global Warming and predictions of doom and gloom, the media has scrambled with excitement to climb aboard. After all the media loves a crisis. From Y2K to killer bees the media just loves to tell us our lives are threatened. And the media is biased toward liberal, so it’s pre-programmed to support Al Gore and UN. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, The LA Times, The Washington Post, the Associated Press and here in San Diego The Union Tribune are all constantly promoting the global warming crisis.

So who is going to go against all of that power? Not the politicians. So now the President of the United States, just about every Governor, most Senators and most Congress people, both of the major current candidates for President, most other elected officials on all levels of government are all riding the Al Gore Global Warming express. That is one crowded bus.

I suspect you haven’t heard it because the mass media did not report it, but I am not alone on the no man-made warming side of this issue. On May 20th, a list of the names of over thirty-one thousand scientists who refute global warming was released. Thirty-one thousand of which 9,000 are Ph.D's. Think about that. Thirty-one thousand. That dwarfs the supposed 2,500 scientists on the UN panel. In the past year, five hundred of scientists have issued public statements challenging global warming. A few more join the chorus every week. There are about 100 defectors from the UN IPCC. There was an International Conference of Climate Change Skeptics in New York in March of this year. One hundred of us gave presentations. Attendance was limited to six hundred people. Every seat was taken. There are a half dozen excellent internet sites that debunk global warming. And, thank goodness for KUSI and Michael McKinnon, its owner. He allows me to post my comments on global warming on the website KUSI.c