Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns. In public discourse, often used as a shorthand for the effects of anthropogenic global warming.
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Is global temperature significantly affected by time of galactic year?
There is a claim that different patches of the galaxy have different climate effects due to variations in cosmic ray strength. I've occasionally heard this used to explain global warming but more ...
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695 views
Is it accurate to say that 97% of experts agree that global warming is anthropogenic?
A recent spate of newspaper headlines reported that 97% of scientists agreed with the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The UK's Daily telegraph reported:
A review of 12,000 scientific ...
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Does physics give a climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide of about 3°C?
A letter to the editor of the Economist from Professor Anders Levermann of the
Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research stated the following:
The IPCC’s range on sensitivity is supported by, ...
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355 views
Are fossil fuels making the world greener?
The populist wisdom on global warming is that it is likely to create environmental catastrophe for reasons such as spreading deserts and environmental degradation (for example, the following quote is ...
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305 views
Are the IPCC climate change models overestimating sensitivity to carbon dioxide?
A recent report in The Register suggests that we might be currently overestimating the degree to which the world will warm with increasing carbon dioxide.
Climate sensitivity is, crudely, the slope ...
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Is avoiding global warming by preventing CO₂ emissions far too expensive compared to geoengineering or adapting to a warmer world?
Experts in the science of global climate change often criticise their opponents by disparaging their expertise in climate science. But experts in climate science are not experts in economics. So when ...
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558 views
Is climate close to a “tipping point”?
James Hansen has long used the idea of a climate tipping point in his public arguments for urgent and drastic action to combat climate change (For an extended exposition of his idea, see a pdf of one ...
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122 views
Did the Roman Empire and the Han Chinese cause (some) global warming? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Did the development of agriculture prevent an ice age occurring?
Some recent news reports about ancient anthropogenic methane emissions have hinted that the simultaneous ...
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668 views
Does being a strong free market supporter correlate with rejection of scientific claims?
The following research claims that there is a link between one being a strong free market supporter and being more likely to reject scientific claims:
Paralleling previous work, we find that ...
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Is there any evidence of a “mosquito line” above which mosquitos do not travel?
Is there any scientific definition or evidence of such a thing as the mosquito line?
My first apartment in Manhattan was on the 25th floor of the Park Row building in the Financial District. The ...
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251 views
Has the Urban Heat Island effect on the US temperature record been underestimated?
One of the early climate-skeptic arguments against the consensus view that the world is warming to a dangerous extent, was that the instrumental record of temperature was corrupted by the Urban Heat ...
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251 views
Is there a conspiracy to refute the AGW theory?
Some sources are claiming that climate change denial is itself a conspiracy of special interests (fossil fuel industry) and right-wing think tanks (Heartland Institute):
Care 2
As Oreskes ...
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287 views
Will reducing atmospheric CO₂ reverse the effects of climate change over a few decades?
There are many calls to help bring down Carbon Dioxide levels. But what are the effects of such an action?
My intuition of the earth as a slow-moving complex system tells me that it will settle into ...
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279 views
Do women 'consume more sustainably than men'?
European Parliament Committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality has adopted the resolution "on women and climate change".
The report argues that climate change exacerbates gender
...
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296 views
Have western governments spent $100billion on global warming research and advocacy?
The author, Robert M Carter argues against Anthropogenic Global Warning and his book is called Climate: the counter consensus. In it he makes two related claims: that the cumulative funding on climate ...
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2k views
Will melting icecaps and glaciers cause the ocean to rise?
I often hear people claim "global warming will cause the ice-caps to melt, and that will cause the water levels in the ocean to rise, and that will cause major world-wide flooding."
Now, ignoring the ...
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Is the United Kingdom funding forced sterilization in India to combat climate change?
The claim is made here:
Tens of millions of pounds of UK aid money have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised Indian women and men [...]
Yet a working paper published by the ...
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1answer
715 views
Are glaciers melting?
There seems to be a scientific consensus that glaciers are melting.
For instance:
Buzzle (Non-peer reviewed web-article):
The last century has been a problem for glaciers across the globe. They ...
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146 views
Can economics of large-scale societal change be accurately predicted? [closed]
Several questions relating to climate change require predictions of costs extrapolated over global scale (e.g., Will a warming world directly damage human health, Could global warming be good for ...
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Will a warming world directly damage human health?
It is widely believed that a warming world will be a worse world (but see this question for a discussion of the minority view: Could Global Warming be good for life?)
The medical community seems to ...
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1answer
455 views
Was the cretaceous the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide was significantly higher than it is today?
Dr. Michael E. Mann recounts a story in his recent book (the Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars) about an encounter with Hilary Clinton during a hostile congressional hearing. While he was fending off ...
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1answer
430 views
Is global warming irreversible?
I have heard countless times the perils of global warming and how we should all do our fair share to save the Earth for future generations.
Here is but one example from an NPR article: "Global ...
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1answer
486 views
Do candles emit ten times the carbon dioxide of an equivalent lightbulb?
In Wasteful Earth Hour?, it's claimed that candles emit roughly 10 times the carbon dioxide of light bulbs of the same brightness. While emissions will vary depending on the candle, the lightbulb and ...
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2answers
466 views
Global warming and mild winters
Does global warming make for milder winters? What about specifically North America?
(You often hear people extol global warming for giving us mild winters. Is there evidence of a causal link?)
Two ...
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1answer
341 views
Is reducing carbon emission from cars futile?
One of the claims in "SuperFreakonomics" is, that reducing CO2 emissions produced by cars have very little practical impact on global warming.
Their arguments are:
human activity is responsible for ...
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333 views
Are the leaked Heartland Institute documents legitimate?
Dr. Phil Plait just posted this regarding the leak of some documents from a group called the Heartland Institute. There is some skepticism as to the authenticity of these documents.
Are these ...
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216 views
Are the specific claims from the “WSJ 16” climate skeptics true?
The Wall Street Journal letter by 16 "prominent scientists" has already provoked a question here ( Are the 16 scientists who claim that climate change is not something to worry about actually ...
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Are the 16 scientists who claim that climate change is not something to worry about actually scientists?
This is a pretty specific question – in the Wall Street Journal article dated January 27, 2012 entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming. There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic ...
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3answers
641 views
Could Global Warming be good for life?
A paper from Nature Geoscience (reported by the BBC here) claims that the carbon dioxide humanity has pumped into the atmosphere is holding off a new Ice Age.
This has revived an old idea best ...
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331 views
Do McKitrick's criticisms of the IPCC accurately represent their processes?
Whatever your position on climate change the most significant results about the scientific consensus are supposed to emerge from the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). It is an ...
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178 views
Are there alternative methods of meat production (such as free-range meat) that are better for the environment than factory farmed meat? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Organic food is worse for the environment because it requires more land than non-organic food
Most meat in developed nations is produced by Industrial agriculture ...
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1answer
536 views
Is the world warmer now than during the Medieval Warm Period?
Climate change seems to polarise comment into denialists and believers. But good skeptics should be able to address specific issues with the data without falling into the anti-science denialist camp. ...
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3answers
351 views
Do the recent CLOUD results have significant implications for global warming?
According to this Science Daily summary of a recent paper published in Nature and the abstract at Nature, a recent result indicates that cosmic rays play a larger role in cloud formation than was ...
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417 views
Do wind farms have a significant impact on weather patterns in the US?
On my way in to work today there was a guest on the radio claiming that the "Heat Dome" was the result of the disturbance of natural wind patterns by the windfarms that have proliferated the ...
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611 views
Does climate change mean that weather becomes more variable in addition to being warmer?
In public media the notion that climate change is more than global warming gets repeated frequently.
Are there strong predictions that show that the climate becomes more irregular? Would we expect ...
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1answer
751 views
Did “global cooling” have as much scientific consensus as “global warming” has now?
it is projected that man's potential
to pollute will increase 6 to 8-fold
in the next 50 years. If this
increased rate of injection... should
raise the present background opacity
by a ...
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Are storms getting more or less severe in the long term for Australia?
Over the past couple of years people have been claiming that storms are getting more severe in Australia. Some linking this to global warming.
Specifically Professor Ross Garnaut in the opening ...
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352 views
Are we heading for a mini ice age?
According to the following article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/14/ice_age/
Sunspot activity is rapidly declining, and when this has happened in the past this has led to a mini ice age. ...
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705 views
Do increasing global temperatures cause earthquakes?
With recent earthquakes, several sources have started claiming that this is a sign of the change we are causing. This paper indicates a historical association (but does not claim causal ...
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550 views
Will humanity's increasing energy usage cause global warming directly in the forseable future? [closed]
(This question was prompted by the discussion at http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3765/ )
The blog post that started this claims that since the earths energy consumption increases by 2% ...
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709 views
Is CO2 the cause for Global Warming?
I know there is global warming, and I know that it is caused by human activity, but is carbon dioxide the cause of it? I read somewhere that apparently increase of CO2 doesn't cause the increase in ...
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760 views
Did we have a “global cooling” 40 years ago?
I was reading Superfreakanomics and the book argues that we had a global cooling period 40 years ago? Is that claim accurate?
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1answer
481 views
Did the development of agriculture prevent an ice age occurring?
The television program How the Earth Made Us has argued that the development of agriculture prevented a new ice age, due to methane production from livestock, and the burning of natural vegetation for ...
9
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2answers
479 views
Would avoiding the eating of meat stop global warming? [duplicate]
Possible Duplicate:
Is being a vegan more environmentally friendly than otherwise?
Would it be sufficient for people to stop eating meat to stop global warming? I've heard that the process ...
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1answer
974 views
Has global mean temperature at sea level increased since 1900?
It is generally accepted that the Earth's global mean (average) temperature has varied throughout history.
Given the difficulties of accurately measuring and calculating temperatures across the ...
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Do human activities contribute to climate change?
There is lots of evidence that I have seen showing correlation between human activities and climate change but what evidence is there to support causation?
