"Global Warming" is a hoax

While a healthy sense of skepticism is always recommended, it is unfortunately the case that the issue of Global Climate Change has become politicized and that the small amount of skepticism on GCC has been over-hyped by the various well-funded industries that don't want the government to take action with pollution and efficiency controls. When surveyed, the vast majority of climate scientists (from organizations such as the National Academies of Science) believe that human activity is to blame for the recent climate changes, though some may disagree on the severity. First, it's inaccurate to characterize the position of the pro-Global Warming/Global Climate Change crowd as believing that the earth is "melting." It is their contention that human activity has finally reached the capacity (through our advanced industrial state) of being able to influence the planet's climate by throwing off-kilter the self-regulating mechanisms that keep our climate stable. Second, the sentence beginning with "According to Accu-Weather" is an unattributed secondhand quote from the anti-Global Warming website globalwarming.org (maintained by the "Cooler Heads Coalition" which is an anti-global warming front group backed by a variety of conservative think tanks and carbon industry proponents). Further, the quote does not come from AccuWeather (as it is attributed), which does not take a position on the issue of Global Climate Change; rather they provide a forum for various persons on either side of the aisle to present their cases. It's likely that the quote should be attributed to one or another of those individuals. Ignoring the source of the AccuWeather quote, measuring temperature and carbon output over the past few decades is insufficient as a much larger sample size is required to draw accurate conclusions about the nature of the climate changes we're currently experiencing. When one expands the record over millions of years (with the data we have available from ice cores and other data collection forms), it becomes apparent that we are experiencing an unprecedented warming trend, and that carbon output levels are at an all-time high. When combining instrumental temperature records for the past 150 years with "proxy indicators" like ice cores and tree rings, we can construct a picture of the global temperature that shows a marked increase in temperature beginning in the 19th century (Jones et al., 1998; Mann et al., 1999; Crowley and Lowery, 2000). These findings are verified by nearly a dozen other model- and proxy-based reconstructions of the Northern Hemisphere. The quote "about 80% of the CO2 from human activities was added to the air after 1940" is also an unattributed secondhand quote pulled from a source I can't identify. The simplest refutation of it is the fact that the rise of industrialism pre-dates 1940. It's not as though 1940 was the first year a coal-fired power plant went into operation; quite the contrary – coal, for example, has been mined and burned for industrial operations since the end of the 18th century. Assuming the statistic is true; it should stand as an alarming example of how rapidly CO2 output has increased in recent decades. The period of cooling between the 40s and the 70s is attributed by many to sulphate aerosols. Not only that, but it's important not to focus too closely on CO2 given that it is estimated to be responsible for only about 25 percent of the greenhouse effect at most – there are plenty of other influential greenhouse gases and other factors that weigh in. Ironically, the period of cooling is a superb example of how much human activity can affect the climate: when chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were banned virtually worldwide in the 1980s – it had a striking observable effect on the phenomenon of ozone depletion. The claim about Antarctica warming is patently false. Quoting from NASA's article "Two Decades of Temperature Change in Antarctica" on its Earth Observatory site: "Across most of the continent and the surrounding Southern Ocean, temperatures climbed." The British Antarctic Survey concluded likewise, saying that the Antarctic Peninsula is "one of the fastest warming parts of the planet" in its article "Climate Change." It's possible (given the other unattributed statistics and quotes) that the claim about Antarctica was taken from fiction author Michael Crichton's shoddily-researched book "State of Fear" in which Crichton (a global warming skeptic) misappropriated research by Peter Doran to make a similar claim. Doran publicly rebuffed Crichton (and all other Global Warming skeptics misusing his data) by saying "...our results have been misused as "evidence" against global warming by Crichton in his novel 'State of Fear'...". With respect to the final claim, I can find zero evidence that the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research Project has found that Antarctica has cooled. Quite the contrary – instead of being Global Climate Change skeptics, the NRS's LTER recognizes the significant consequences of Global Warming, stating on its website: "The study of Global Change is particularly important as it is now clear that human social and economic activities around the world are having an impact that can be measured at the level of the entire Earth and its atmosphere, oceans, and land surface. Human activities are probably the most rapidly changing component among the major regulators of the Earth system, and may—in the future—play a dominant role in the regulation of global climate, global biogeochemistry, and the diversity and stability of global ecosystems."