Resolved: Countries ought work to end climate change/global warming.
Methodology of surface station experiments: I'm not saying that my opponent's evidence
is inherently faulty. He certainly brings up a good point. However, the conclusion
that he comes up to doesn't make sense at all. The methodology of the United States
is flawed, so every single piece of evidence is invalidated when it comes to proving
that human-caused global warming is existant. Yes, this is a study that is presented
to the entire world, but this doesn't mean that every single study in the world about
global warming is inherently wrong because this evidence is only speaking about the
United States and how it conducts its studies rather than how England, France, Sweden,
or other countries would conduct experiments. Heck, my opponent doesn't even give
the specific organization from the United States that conducted this study. Global
warming is tested by the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, countless universities
in the United States, etc. Why should a specific study from a specific organization
in a specific country account for all the global warming studies in the world? That
makes no sense. Furthermore, I explained already that global surface stations are
adjusted for possible lurking variables for air conditioners anyway by the scientists
conducting the study, meaning that the data is not unreliable. Fraud: So because different
studies with different methodologies reach the same conclusion as a supposedly fraudulent
one, that automatically means that my sources are faulty. That's completely unfair
because it's a complete generalization of all evidence on global warming on the basis
of a couple of studies that my opponent tries to prove were fraudulent. CO2 and N2O:
My opponent obviously doesn't understand the chemistry here. I explained already that
CO2 isn't even the strongest greenhouse gas. It's the greenhouse gas that is put most
abundantly into the atmosphere from emissions. This is not to say, however, that CO2
has absolutely no impact on rising global temperatures. Furthermore, we must understand
the following: what we can do currently is reduce emissions and reduce the amount
of CO2 and other greenhouse gases entering into the atmosphere, but once it has entered
the atmosphere, how do we get it out? What my opponent also doesn't understand about CO2 is that not all of it enters into
the atmosphere. Portions of it enter into the ocean and become dissolved in it, contributing to its
acidification, which harms the biodiversity of the aquatic environment and causes
negative impacts to communities living close to these aquatic regions. The amount
of CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't speak entirely about how much of it is being emitted.
Therefore, no, CO2 isn't out of the picture. I guess I can talk a bit about N2O as
well here, even though that all I was saying was the N2O and methane are more potent
greenhouse gases than CO2, most particularly 300 times more potent than CO2. There's
a reason why my opponent's evidence seems to be showing these ideas and facts about
how CO2 increases and temperature increases were so small or insignificant, but it
isn't even analyzing all of the greenhouse gases. Global warming=Increase in global
average temperature: What my opponent continues to misunderstand is that we are looking
at the mean global temperatures and not specific regions. He claims that I ignore
the basic rules of statistics, but then he gives only a few examples of countries
that are seemingly not increasing in temperature according to the evidence. He provides
no proof that these countries are significant deviations, and even when they are not
increasing in their temperatures as the evidence seemingly presents, the global temperature
mean still is increasing. Greenland: I never concede the point anywhere that one example
is representative of the whole. I wonder where I said that because there could possibly
be a misunderstanding that my opponent made. "Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost
a combined mass of 475 gigatonnes a year on average. That’s enough to raise global
sea level by an average of 1.3 millimeters (.05 inches) a year. (A gigatonne is one
billion metric tons, or more than 2.2 trillion pounds.) Ice sheets are defined as
being larger than 50,000 square kilometers, or 20,000 square miles, and only exist
in Greenland and Antarctica while ice caps are areas smaller than 50,000 square km.
The pace at which the polar ice sheets are losing mass was found to be accelerating
rapidly. Each year over the course of the study, the two ice sheets lost a combined
average of 36.3 gigatonnes more than they did the year before. In comparison, the
2006 study of mountain glaciers and ice caps estimated their loss at 402 gigatonnes
a year on average, with a year-over-year acceleration rate three times smaller than
that of the ice sheets." Global cooling: The global cooling arguments seem to include
La Nina, which could be a skew in the general graph since it normally brings cold
weather. Works Cited "The Causes of Global Warming: A Global Warming FAQ." Union of
Concerned Scientists. Web. <http://www.ucsusa.org...;. "Melting Ice Sheets Now Largest
Contributor to Sea Level Rise." Science Daily. Web. <http://www.sciencedaily.com...;. "Nitrious Oxide." EPA. Environmental Protection Agency. Web. 02 May 2012. <http://www.epa.gov...;.
"Nitrous Oxide: Definitely No Laughing Matter When It Comes To Global Warming." ScienceDaily.
ScienceDaily, 18 Feb. 2008. Web. 02 May 2012. <http://www.sciencedaily.com...
Debate.org
Pro vs. con view
Topic space view
