Who says humans can't effect climate and temperature?
I'm tired of hearing this from idiots who can't be bothered to check anything out for themselves. Here's just a few events marked on a global temperature variation chart... there's plenty more, likely nearly every variation can be charted and connected to man made causes (such as wars) or natural causes (such as volcanoes), but what should be blazingly obvious to anyone is the undeniable fact that humans do indeed effect the environment, and rather profoundly at that.
Yes, it's a quick and dirty photoshop job... I hate using it. Perhaps sometime I'll make a better chart with more events, but this really should be enough to make the point.
Some noteworthy dips in temperature... the Tunguska event in 1908 which apparently threw a lot of dust into the atmosphere, causing a cooling period... this can also be seen on a smaller scale when Mount Saint Hellens errupted in 1980. These hardly compare to the obvious temperature drop after World War II, which most likely had a dual cause in the end of the massive amounts of frenetic activity during the war as well as atmospheric dust caused by the dropping of the atomic bombs.
As per thelicense, picture from Global Warming Art. Original found here.
8 comments:
I notice your graph only goes back to around 1840. How about a graph from geologic surveys showing back 1, 10, or 100 thousand years? It's easy to lie with statistics.
looks like you got it all figured out. I would however look into the extent that production actually continued if not increased during the 1950s with the expansion of mass production consumerism and Marshall plan sponsored rebuilding. Plus regardless of these two nitpicks we still cant say definitively that this general (if slight) warming trend is caused by human activity we simply do not have a long enough sample of average temperature when compared to the geological age of the planet. oh well, I mean they're making popular movies about global warming now so it must be all true right?
The graph goes back only for actual recorded temps, not estimates.
As for long term trends... I'm not making any assertions on that. I just wanted to point out to certain people who think that humans are UNABLE to be the cause of global warming (and there seems to be an inordinate number of them) that man CAN and HAS changed the climate on a global scale, which is born out by this graph.
But the problem is that your chart does not prove anything. You are mistaking correlation with causation. Just because two events occur at the same time does not prove cause and affect.
I'm sure someone can produce a chart that proves that the temperature changes correlate to the rise and fall of church attendance, or of various political party's around the world being in or out of office, etc.
Uh, that previous comment is completely untrue and infact very ignorant.
Do you really think that us, puny mortals, affect the whole Earth's mechanism and ecosystems? Here's a clue: Earth don't give a shit about us and can wipe us out with a fart.
Earth can sustain a direct meteor hit. We can't.
Anonymous above, we're not talking about affecting anything other than the atmosphere of the planet, which is extremely thin.
We know we've dumped enough CO2 into the atmosphere to significantly increase the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere:
"As of January 2007, the earth's atmospheric CO2 concentration is about 0.0383% by volume (383 ppmv) or 0.0582% by weight. This represents about 2.996×1012 tonnes, and is estimated to be 105 ppm (37.77%) above the pre-industrial average.
...
Despite its small concentration, CO2 is a very important component of Earth's atmosphere, because it absorbs infrared radiation at wavelengths of 4.26 µm (asymmetric stretching vibrational mode) and 14.99 µm (bending vibrational mode) and enhances the greenhouse effect." - Wikipedia: "Carbon Dioxide"
Good words.
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