vtmarik wrote:I never said that we weren't having an effect, I merely said that we aren't the root cause of it all. I said "We certainly aren't helping matters." The amount of impact that humanity is having on global warming is minuscule compared to the big picture. Global warming is a natural phenomenon, it isn't all caused by big bad Mankind.
Have you ever taken a math that delt with looking at models like growth curves, it gets taught in some calculas classes. The point is that living systems usually follow something called a logistics curve that resembles exponential growth until it peaks.
Once the maximum carrying capacity is met it might look like a straight line but the numbers alternate between going up and down. These living systems balance themselves out and can be looked at for the population of one species, the carbon cycle, or the water cycle. Until the industrial revolution, the natural world had spent millions of years accumulating carbon into the ground and soaking into the oceans. It doesn't matter whether volcanoes put out more greenhouse gases than the whole human world has since the industrial revolution began, the amount may look insignificant but that is illusion. The carbon we dig up was removed from the system and unused, whereas all of these examples that people try to bring up to deflect the human impact were already being balanced by the world.
It doesn't matter if we release .2% or lower into the atmosphere. The question is how much we can release before the model gets broken and a new one replaces it. Hey it might be a good thing, maybe changing weather patterns will allow us to grow more crops. The "doom and gloom" message that Al Gore had in his movie about civilization falling was about this condition, could humanity learn to repopulate the world if the weather patterns change before massive starvation kicks in? The problem isn't about the Earth becoming inhabitable, it's about how much our societies and the natural world could cope with global changes.
I hope that clears it up some, there are a lot of misconceptions being thrown about by people who have no idea what is going on.