what is global warming?

[loki]

I don't really get what is global warming and how long does the temperature have to go up to be global warming? If the temperatures goes down for a few years, hundred years, thousand years, but over ten thousand years average it's going up is that still global warming?

[paul m]

Global warming - making the Earth the temperature it is at present is caused by the greenhouse effect (given the name by Svante Arrhenius after it was predicted in the early 19th century by the mathematician Joseph Fourier) - without a proportion of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere the temperature would be much lower - probably too low to support life.
Increasing the amount of greenhouse gases causes more solar heat to be retained (decreasing them would cool the atmosphere). As I mentioned on the other thread - we should really be talking about 'accelerated global warming'.

[CyberPredator]

Already global warming is having major human impact, but the healthy in priveliged societies will not really feel the impact for another 20 years or so. The wealthy willobviously escape much of the medium term fall out.

Coupled with declining fossil fuel production, life for many poor people will become intolerable. Or should I say more people will fall into intolerable poverty, but their voices will never be heard. Food production is so heavily dependent upon fossil fuels the prospects for large numbers of humans is bleak indeed.

The only question is whether the earth's environment will ever stabilise or has it already been pushed beyond the limits of its homeostatic mechanisms and desolation is inevitable. The skeptics in the know are not sceptical about global warming, but whether mankind has the capacity to affect the inevitable catastrophe that is maybe less than 1 or 2 centuries away. For them its simply a matter of making hay while the sun shines as collapse is sure to follow. But they will never tell you that because individual people are too small and insignificant to count.