The Oil Drum

The whole debate about global warming shows that you should always look at the numbers first. Saying that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing the Earth to heat rapidly is just false. First of all the most important GHG is water vapor and not CO2. Water warms the Earth when it's vapor, but it can cool it when forming clouds (clouds are little droplets forming around aerosols and that means that coal alongside CO2 emissions, emits a lot of ashes and aerosols that help form clouds and thus block the sun. Natural gas is "clean" and emits mostly CO2, causing warming effects ONLY ).
Secondly the total world natural emissions from various sources (forest fires, volcanoes, oceans etc.) are much greater than human caused emissions. There are about 1900 GT of CO2 in the atmosphere and a one year cycle is equal to 210 GT. Burning fossil fuels ads 6 GT of carbon dioxide each year, being less than 3% of the total emissions of CO2 and less than 0.3% of the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. About one third of those 6GT stays in the atmosphere, the rest is sequestered naturally. CO2 is "responsible" for 9% of the GH effect. So anthropogenic CO2 emissions are strengthening the GH effect by 0,09% each year. This is still a LOT if you take into account that the process will be, at best, constant (0.09% for 100 years gives 9.5% rise! and the natural sequestration will probably slow down).
So YES, we are causing climate change, but many people, like Gore aren't telling the whole truth. It's not only CO2 and not only humans and most of all, not only fossil fuels!.
Another inconvenient truth is the fact that a trivial phenomenon called breathing is responsible for the biggest part of anthropogenic GHG emissions. An average person "emits" 300 kg of CO2/a. That multiplied by 6.5 billion people gives you about 2GT of CO2 per year! That's almost one third of what we are producing with all of our cars, jet planes, coal fire power plants etc. Up to late 40s humans were producing more carbon dioxide by breathing than fossil fuels burning. What about agriculture? What about 3 billions cows, pigs and chickens? Don't they breath as well? I was not able to find any data about the amount of CO2 "produced" by livestock, but if you just simply multiply the human "emissions" of 300 kg by the factor of 7 (cattle body mass is more or less 7 times higher than human body) and the number of cattle - 1.3 bln, you will get 2.7GT of CO2. That's just cottle! That means that if you sum up just the exhaled CO2 from humans and life stock you will get more CO2 than fossil fuels create. Livestock and agriculture also produce a lot of methane (over 20 times stronger GHG than CO2) and other strong greenhouse gases. Instead of pumping CO2 into oceans, how about cutting our meat consumption by a factor of 2?
By studying different aspects of PO I learned to dig really deep to find the right data. I see that a lot of you don't check the facts about global warming and you just BELIVE it.

My three cents.