Actually, there is nothing unprecedented with respect to the contemporary climate. There have been more rapid and more extreme climate changes in the past 11,000 years. The climate record for the most recent glacial period also shows periods of extreme variation as well - none of which was caused by either CO2 or human emissions of CO2. Tree stumps washed out from underneath Alpine glaciers are a clear indicator that forests once grew where today only mountain glaciers exist. The tree line in northern Canada was once over 100 kilometres further north than it presently is. So while it is warmer today than it was in the middle of the Little Ice Age of 400 years ago (and which only ended about 150 years ago), there have been warmer eras in the last 11,000 years of the Holocene, warmer eras in which corals didn't die off, polar bears didn't go extinct or ice caps totally melt. The fact is, the earth is still in an Ice Age. We just happen to find ourselves in an interglacial warm period instead of having Toronto buried somewhere underneath a kilometre of ice (as it would have been 20,000 years ago).
Oxygen is still 20.95% of the atmosphere. Second only after nitrogen.
Thank you thank you thank you. This is exactly the kind of reasoning people should be looking for.
I find a rather interesting but disturbing phenomenon: so many Canadians just take what the media or politicians say for granted. They believe global warming/climate change is real with just minimum evidence from the TV, and they associate believing it with being "liberal" or "progressive", instead of truly looking into whether it is the truth, or it is just a hypothesis manipulated by biased researchers and ambitious politicians, who always need "new ideas" to stand out.
I don't have much background in natural science but I think everyone should reserve the right to question the big hyper over climate change over the past decade or so. The earth has a much much longer history than any of us has any knowledge of,much longer than human history, and the measurement of earth temperature wasn't possible until a mere 100 years ago?? Yet these people just become fully convinced that the earth is warming, and that it is a long term trend (instead of a small natural episode of the earth itself), and that human behavior causes it, and that whoever don't believe it must be some sort of backward redneck bigot who is against the environment.
Someone simply put it there " Global warming is there, change is not good, warm or cold". What kind of background qualifies you to make such a definitive statement as if nothing else can be true? Do you have any idea how big this topic is? How many statistics have you researched, and over how many years (should be in thousands or even tens of thousands instead of "the past 50 years")? And what kind of statistical analysis has convinced you that it is human-behavior, rather than anything else, that has caused the rising of temperature, if at all? My bet is she has done none of this, and simply accepts this half baked theory as the Bible from being brainwashed by our politicians and media and believe anyone against it is simply stupid and backward.
Many seem to think because "many scientists said so, so it must be true". How many scientists? How do you know these scientists are impartial to the results? How many of the labs of these scientists are funded by the government, who actually have a big say what kind of results they want to support their policy? What about all the scientists who say otherwise? Do you have any idea how the government may influence the scientist labs and selectively published results they prefer to see?
It absolutely blows my mind that so many so called liberal-minded Canadians are so heavily brainwashed by the media into believing something that is so far from a verified scientific truth. What's more funny is that they think believing so makes them one of those with educated elites with "progressive views", and not believing it on the other hand is utter ignorance. Think about it. How can you be so convinced that the earth is really warming, just based on 100 years' of measurement, when the earth itself has a history of millions of years? A very very minor shift in the normal pattern of the Earth itself can cause a far deeper influence on the temperature than all that human-beings have caused combined during our entire history. The earth might got warmer by 1C during the past 60 years, but how do you know that's just what the earth is supposed to experience, and how do you know in 150 years, the earth won't be 3C colder, just because it entered a different stage?
I am not against reducing emission and making the earth a cleaner environment to live on. However, I just find it appalling and stupid that so many of us just take such a half-assed theory as absolute truth and don't even allow others to question its validity. That's just sad and show the huge lack of critical and independent thinking among all of us.
