Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO. We don't need a net global increase to produce catastrophic global climate problems.
British weather reports are becoming dominated by flooding - there are several causes including climate change, poor location of housing, deforestation.
Ignoring climate change based on fossil-fuel emissions we still are running out of fossil fuels and need to find other secondary energy sources. If those sources are renewable then this prevents us having the same problem again in a few years when, say, Uranium reserves are depleted. We should then have an extremely strong impetus to ween ourselves off our current high levels of power consumption and to exploit to the greatest extent we can clean renewable power sources. If we do this then we also are tackling part of the cause of the [potential] greenhouse effect anyway.
If you're in a building and you smell smoke, see it in the corridors, feel warmer; you can assume that the smoke is coming in through a window from another building, or you can pull the fire alarm - there may not be sufficient evidence for either position, but some people it seems want to wait until their clothes catch fire before making their move. It would be too late.
Global warming - not exactly sure; climate change, undeniable; human-induced climate change, undoubtedly IMO
That's the issue. (I upvoted you btw) That the climate is going through a short period of less than stable behaviour is certainly evident. It's also evident that it's gone through such behavior in the past, with both more and less variance. There have been ice ages FFS, and that had nothing to do with man.
It seems like we are having an influence in our current whether patterns, but we simply have nowhere near the amount of data to know this beyond theory.
To say that we are - without doubt - causing the earth's climate to change when we can't predict the "change" accurately is scientifically irresponsible.
There's a lot of confirmation bias I think. Last year the winter around here was colder than usual, and you will not stop hearing people claim it's because of global warming. The next year people continue to use these anecdotes to justify the existence of global warming.
Actually, AFAIK, climate change is supposed to cause greater variability in temperatures, not just uniformly higher temperatures. This is what I've heard from scientists like James Hansen.
Therefore, one would expect more episodes of lower temperature (cold snaps), but also more periods of higher temps (heatwaves).
British weather reports are becoming dominated by flooding - there are several causes including climate change, poor location of housing, deforestation.
Ignoring climate change based on fossil-fuel emissions we still are running out of fossil fuels and need to find other secondary energy sources. If those sources are renewable then this prevents us having the same problem again in a few years when, say, Uranium reserves are depleted. We should then have an extremely strong impetus to ween ourselves off our current high levels of power consumption and to exploit to the greatest extent we can clean renewable power sources. If we do this then we also are tackling part of the cause of the [potential] greenhouse effect anyway.
If you're in a building and you smell smoke, see it in the corridors, feel warmer; you can assume that the smoke is coming in through a window from another building, or you can pull the fire alarm - there may not be sufficient evidence for either position, but some people it seems want to wait until their clothes catch fire before making their move. It would be too late.
- http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/11/the-coming-ur... current supplies run dry in 2013 unless new fields are found and exploited.