it's "official". humans heating the earth

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Studies Attribute Ocean Warming to Human Actions by Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Greenhouse gas emissions have caused the world's oceans to heat up over the past half century, according to studies that researchers said this week pointed with near certainty to human activity, not natural climate fluctuations, as the culprit behind global warming.

Research teams led by Sydney Levitus of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Tim Barnett of the University of California at San Diego's Scripps Institute of Oceanography used different climate models to simulate how ocean temperatures would respond to current greenhouse gas levels and other modern-day atmospheric conditions.

Both models predicted an amount of warming in the upper 1.9 miles of the world's oceans remarkably similar to levels actually measured, according to the studies appearing in the journal Science. Experts previously reported that the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans collectively had warmed an average of 0.1 degrees Fahrenheit since 1955.

"Our results indicate that the warming of the Earth's climate system during the 1955 to 1996 period is most likely due to the increase of greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere observed over the past 100 years. We believe this is some of the strongest evidence to date that this warming is, in fact, of human-induced origin," Levitus said in an interview on Thursday.

Barnett added that the results provide a "95 percent confidence level" that human-produced greenhouse gases are behind the warming. --snip--

sigh. computers, like guns, can be dangerous in the hands of the wrong people.

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2001

Answers

The history of this earth shows intense, periodic, hot and cold spells, even sudden ice ages. Was all this human induced? Personally, I think that humans are having very little effect on global warming. Polution, yes, but not warming to any significant degree. If they want to find the reason for the warming trend I think they need to go look at all the current undersea volcanic activity, and the hot vents down there which push tremendous amounts of heat into the sea every minute. And the natural outpouring of methane all over the place which further contributes to the so called green house effect.

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2001

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