Does increased level of CO2 cause, or is a result of, global warming?

Yes. Watch Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth.” It explains it all.

You gotta quit reading tripe like the Daily Mail. The question is not more esoteric than fluther can handle, fluther is just grounded in reality which is non existent at the Daily Mail.

Yes, the exponential growth in CO2 production has caused climate change. That is settled science. If you want to express your opinion on climate change, what is your opinion on gravity?

NASA article about your latest solar cycle started in 2008 !!

Duh ! Not what is causing long time climate change.

For science go to a science based source not one that “Can show you pictures of little Greenmen/Women” like Dailymail.

I don’t believe the earth is about to flip around on it’s poles. Massive increases in solar flares might have miniscule affects, but we are not in a consistent time of massive solar flares right now. I remember once reading that a large increase in solar flares might have brought on some cooling of the earth, but I would have to go back and research that.

I also believe that more trees grow when there is CO2 in the air and when the climate is warm enough. So, as we warm we get a natural balance of nature producing more flora that can use the CO2, but then we get more fauna that produce CO2. Nature seeks a homeostasis, but it is imperfect if fluctuates. Man producing excessive CO2 and other chemicals that interrupt the balance is likely part of the problem with out climate change situation.

My point is, I do think there are natural changes of give and take that affect our climate, there is some cyclical effects outside of mans’ influence. What we can control we should try to. Almost everything we can do to reduce CO2 omissions and methane (also thought to affect global warming) has many other positive affects on our health and the health of the planet. There is no reason not to pursue reducing CO2 and methane that I can tell. Only an upside.

There is no “belief” involved here. Global warming is anthropogenic.

If you are going to claim that the increased CO2 levels are the ‘result’ of global warming, you better come up with some good evidence that human industry, transportation, and power generation like coal and oil are not producing any CO2, and that the systematic destruction of forests by human civilisation has not resulted in a decreased capacity of the planet to absorb CO2 and convert it into oxygen.
Good luck with that.

The switching of the earth’s magnetic field will cause its own problems, but they will be short term and quickly settle out. But the cumulative belching of carbon and other compounds into the atmosphere and ocean mark us for untold crawling catastrophe. There’s no longer any doubt about it.

I believe the magnetosphere is a bigger contributor than anything man-made. @Tropical_Willie You keep trying to say we measure solar activity and it isn’t changing consistent with the increasing temperature. And that is probably true. But that doesn’t discount the magnetosphere. Earth’s magnetic field is what blocks out most of the solar radiation and keeps our planet habitable. If the solar activity is constant, but the magnetic field is thinning or shrinking, the effect is to allow more solar radiation through to our habitable little bubble. That will cause an increase in our global temperatures.
Something else to consider for all of you that believe it is all man-made, if you read the article provided in the question you find this magnetic field has been contracting for the last 200 years. Huh. Doesn’t that coincide with what you all believe to be the time period that man started really impacting the environment?

In my line of work I get to play with some interesting equipment. In the infrared region CO2 looks black. That is how mosquitoes can find humans even if the victim is downwind. They can see the black vapor coming out of our mouths.
That black gas absorbs more heat than clear air.
The US consumes about 140 billion gallons of gasoline per year. (That number is 15 years old now . You can find the most recent number yourself.) One gallon of gasoline burned yields 19 pounds of CO2. That is simple chemistry.
Fuel consumption for home heating is about the same value.
Now add in factories
You do the math.
Given that CO2 does not break down for many decades imagine pouring black dye into the air. No wonder the temperature is rising.
Sure, there are cycles. But the fossil records do not show anything moving this quickly. Nor do the records show 9 billion people with ⅓ of them living so close to the coast.
Feel free to ignore it but the smart money is betting on science.

It is 100% certain that burning fossil fuels are causing global warming and that global warming is man made. There really isn’t any debate on this except amongst the right wing conspiracy wackos.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4549

@Caravanfan Thanks for the link. As promised, the podcast (I just read the transcript) is non-political. By necessity it is somewhat incomplete because climate science is too complex to boil down to 2–3 pages. The things that are missing (that I have read about) are:

1. Cloud formation and rainfall.
2. Magnetosphere.

Yes, global warming is a natural event, and has happened before. Here is the problem: man made events are bringing it about much faster than before, and it will cause a lot of destruction that can be avoided with proper management.

While it’s true that there have always been natural warming and cooling cycles, the global mean surface temperature fluctuates in predictable ways during those cycles. Like @YARNLADY said, what scientists started noticing in the 1950s (long before the issue became a political football) is that the global mean surface temperature is increasing at a much higher rate than data predicts.

The difference between the expected global mean surface temperature and the actual global mean surface temperature is what has climate scientists worried, which is why the people who want to deal with the problem talk about limiting warming to a certain amount rather than eliminating it. Some warming is inevitable. We just have to keep our contributions to it under control so that our way of life is not entirely destroyed.

Looking at the article, most of it is about geomagnetic reversal and the dangers that could (but might not) come with it. The bit about global warming and climate change is almost a throwaway line. Nevertheless, I looked up the study and found that it is mostly about correlations between data sets with no real evidence about which way the causal arrow goes. The study also says that human production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are a contributor to global warming. The claim is just that cosmic rays might be the largest natural source during warming cycles.

Also, the Daily Mail article is not current, and the underlying theory is not new. This means it is possible to see how the theory about cosmic rays has panned out. First, the scientific community did take it seriously. But it looks like further study failed to support the original findings. It turns out that the original study contained some errors in calculation. And once we correct for those errors, we no longer see a strong correlation between climate and cosmic rays. There have actually been several different attempts to replicate the original study or achieve similar findings, but none of them have succeeded.

It’s definitely an interesting idea, and I’m glad that it got a fair assessment from other climate scientists. Unfortunately, the numbers don’t seem to have worked out.

@YARNLADY Thanks for your answer. I believe the only reason postulated by climate scientists that this particular warming cycle is irreversible is because of the speed at which temperatures are rising.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield Thanks for a complete, well-researched and well-presented answer. You must work in the field. Like I said in my question I had not even heard of the magnetosphere until recently and have not dug into it very much. After your detailed answer, I won’t bother. In case I do, I have your links.

Thanks again.

@Caravanfan I looked at the link you provided and one of the first things I noticed was this sentence ” Cosmic rays bombard the Earth at a rate that is more or less constant over time. ” As described by the link in the original question, this statement is not true. And the rest of that section was all based on this assumption. That casts extreme doubt on the rest of the article.

In my opinion, blaming Co2 for the greenhouse effect is like blaming one player for an entire team’s lousy track record.

To carry on in this analogy imagine the league in which they play (any sport) is called the “greenhouse effect”. Now the two top teams in that league are called “Industrial Methane” and “Biogenic Methane”. Of these two teams, the one that usually comes in second place has a player called Co2.

Since records begin in 1750 the levels of atmospheric methane have increased by about 150% causing something called positive radiative forcing.

(please use the link provided to read about +RF because whilst interesting, the explanation could comatose a meth-head). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing

So methane counts for about 20% of the earth’s total +RA and this has gone up by 150%..!

Why.?

Because of our Big-2, Industrial & Biogenic methane which basically consists of any “fossil fuels” (including petrol) and the walking, belching & farting version of dinner for the majority of the 7.5 billion people in this particular glasshouse.

So basically the only thing to blame for the greenhouse effect is meat-eating, car owners that like central heating and hot running water in their homes.

So we blame Co2 instead, cos it can’t possibly be my fault..!

There is no question that mankind is responsible for the rapid and accelerating concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and oceans. The latest hype over the magnetosphere as culprit did not pan out, yet is now adopted by those who don’t have a clue as to how the earth’s magnetic field operates in deflecting cosmic rays (ionized particles) along the its lines of force to the earth’s magnetic poles. Variations in the strength of that field are never sufficient to significantly effect this process. And as such, there is no evidence whatsoever of any increase in charged particles interacting with our atmosphere or us on the ground.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield JeSuis (You definitely are!) I have been digging into your links. Unfortunately they involve too many terms that I, as a layperson, keep having to look up. So progress is painfully slow. However, I gather from the research that so-called conclusions about climate change are anything but; the whole science is in a state of flux where data from new-fangled space-based measurements is used to support or refute various hypotheses.

Would you agree with that summary?

@stanleybmanly I have to correct so many of your statements, I don’t know where to start. Let’s start with cosmic rays. There are indeed charged particles in cosmic radiation. They are usually individual protons or sometimes pieces of a nucleus. But most of those are coming from our sun. They are coming from outside the galaxy or from the Milky Way galaxy itself with the smallest part coming from our sun. But all of these are blocked mainly by the magnetosphere. The incident radiation (primaries) are blocked by the magnetosphere and end up causing other ionized particles (secondaries). Most of these are captured by the Van Allen belts. Some eventually work their way through to our atmosphere which interact again (tertiaries). We often see these as the Aurora Borealis.
But the sun gives us other energies as well and the magnetosphere also helps block these out, as do the various layers of our atmosphere. So if the magnetosphere is shrinking down or getting thinner, that means the radiation can start getting through a little easier. We are effectively removing shielding from our planet. The result is more energy is deposited in the atmosphere and on the Earth itself. And voila! you have global warming. And it would likely show as it has…not much impact at first but growing impact as we hit a more critical density of the Magnetosphere.

@seawulf575 @JeSuisRickSpringfield Both of you guys are way out of my league. I think I could make the effort and possibly catch up to where you were last year. But I would rather that you two have the conversation, and I’ll just eavesdrop on it.

Actually it’s both and that’s not a good thing. There is also more methane as a result and water vapor too. The warmer it gets the more of all this is in the atmosphere…the warmer it gets…the more of…

@AYKM You make climate ‘science’ sound like the chicken or egg puzzle…