Volcanic usually consist of water and sulfurdioxide. Carbondioxide is a component of volcanic eruptions, though.

So you are claiming the measurable increase in greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere is caused by increased volcanic activity. Did you research it? Has there been increased volcanic activity in the last 150 years?

Edit: I have no idea what's wrong with the quoting. I spent 5 minutes looking and making sure I spelled things right and put quote tags in all the right places but I'm stumped

Edit Edit: Fixed it by removing the quote tags from my quotation from an external link. Silly forums.

I couldn't find any specific numbers for greenhouse gas emissions from either of those specific eruptions with a brief google search, but I will point you here (and there are plenty are plenty of other articles that are easy to find with a quick google search). Considering you were too lazy to look for the information for yourself, I'll even quote the relevant sentence just in case you're too lazy to read links:

"Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons of carbon dioxide per year while man's activities contribute about 10 billion tons per year."

And that's a major underestimate (or outdated) of human activities' contribution. If you look at the table at the bottom of this article, you'll see that as of 2004, human-caused CO2 emissions are closer to 30 billion tons per year. So no, volcanoes aren't responsible for anywhere near the amount of CO2 we've been putting out.

So what do you have to say about the fact that CO2 levels have risen at unprecendented rates since the Industrial revolution began, and that current CO2 levels are unprecendented in over 600,000 years? In the past 600,000 years we observe a very regular cycle of ice ages, corresponding to an equally regular cycle of CO2 level variations. So now that we've put CO2 levels 40% higher than they've ever been in that whole period of time, why is it so crazy to worry that there might be a consequence?

Heres an interesting article about sea levels rising as it pertains to our water supply. http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=could-the-oceans-rise-enough It basicly says as the sea levels continue to rise, many coastal regions will have to deal with the big problem of salt water contaminating their groundwater.

The main causes of global warming that are hitting the headlines are either something to do with activities of mankind or natural cycles of the earth. The people who say that global warming is caused by activities of mankind blame the burning of fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas. But fossil fuels are the lifeblood of out civilization and without them our civilization comes to an end. The people who blame the sun say there is very little we can do to stop global warming. According to an opinion research they advocate only having one child. But who is going to do that.

Absolutely not. It is possible to achieve CO2 reductions up to about 50% without affecting our civilization a lot. Some of the necessary measures will no doubt be impopular, but the end of civilization? No.

Let's take a look at various places of society that produce CO2:

Transport:

• The average car currently runs about 15km a litlre. The current best cars like Toyota Prius or FIAT 500 can do about 22 km a litre. Within 10 years we will see cars that achieve 30 km a litre. So we can halve fuel consumption just by technological advances. Add some benefit from the use of biofuels, perhaps electric cars, absolutely no problem here.
• Planes are more problematic, but will get more efficient over time. Halving fuel consumption is perhaps not feasible here, biofuels may help with the CO2 consumption.

In the house & office:

• Compact fluorescent and LED-lights can easily divide electricity consumption to light the house by a factor 4-5.
• If computers would step back 1 iteration of Moore's law in performance, their energy consumption would more than halve.
• Heating: Insulate home, use better heating equipment. Problem: Largely already implemented in many parts of the world.
• Warm water: problematic. Perhaps a solar panel on the roof
• Televisions: Energy savings already achieved by switching from CRT to LCD. Much to my regret as I deeply love CRT televisions & computer displays for their image quaity.
• Devices consuming stanby power: Force manufacturers to design better devices.

Shops

• Supermarkets are often enormous CO2 disasters. Huge heaters in front of doors that are open even in the winter and cooling equipment that's not covered. Halving the energy consumption can be achieved by just putting doors in front of the cooling equipment.
  
• Close shop doors in winter

Electricity production:

• Replace coal & oil plants by hydro, nuclear, wind.
• Cover roofs of homes with solar panels.
  

I don't want to discuss how crap some of those measures will be or what they will cost. No doubt they will suck, and they will cost us mountains of money, which is why no one is doing a 50% in CO2 reduction yet. But suppose we would implement most of this, which part of civilization would stop to exist when the 50% reduction has been achieved? Nothing?

The CO2 problem is the most difficult environmental problem yet that humanity needs to solve, but we can do it.

Or we could look at reality.  The oceans have cooled off in recent years so much that the sharks are fishing on the shores, and our record high temperatures that likely never existed are a product of our limited, eroneous view being warped by faulty sensor equipment that hasn't been maintained.  Antarctica is expanding.  The Earth is cooling, even the crazies are starting to replace "Global Warming" with the new buzz words.

Everyone get ready for "Climate Change" to destroy civilization!

I'll cut off my nuts for the environment when there's actually something substantive.  Decreasing green house gases when it's well known that we're approaching the end of a relatively brief warm period inbetween ice ages is somewhere between hilarious and suicidal.

If there really is global warming it ain't happening fast enough!

Source?

Antarctica is expanding? I guess that's why huge ice shelves that have been around fo millenia have decided to vanish in the span of a few years, eh? Where are you getting your definition of expansion from?

You can scream all you want, but it's all in vain if you don't provide anything to back up your claims.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html?full=true&print=true

Lovelock. Read.

My name isnt Lovelock.  But I read it anyhow.

Im glad the 90 year old fart who they interviewed in that story is flying to space.  I like reading stories where the central theme is how humans are going to cause the Earth to heat up by 2 degrees, thereby killing 80% of the world's population.  But thats ok, because the story has a happy ending, he is flying to space...with a camera!  You go boy!  I might read that article to my child tonight as a bedtime story.  He even mentioned about how scared they were during "Dubawah Dubawah Two" but how happy they were at the same time.  Huh?  Possibly that is just the random story-telling that old people like to do.

At least he didnt harp on fossil fuel consumption, THEN brag about going to space.  Talk about hypocritical.

Ignorance is easy to fix on your own you know, you could say... do a google search?

Unreported alternative cause for some of that rapid melting you were talking about.  Which, by the way, was replaced at a similar rate.

Antarctica has been steadily increasing in size since the late 70's.  It's just shy of the size it was in the early seventies, you know, right before it actually lost a shitload of mass over a few years time?  Oh right, no one knows that the 70's were a heat wave because they've been listening to idiots tell them these are the hottest years on record if they only ignore the whole water thing.  What with 70% of the earths surface being covered in it, that whole cooler ocean bit just ain't playing along!

For anyone seriously interested in proving themselves wrong, go here and do what no greeny has ever done before, click the dropdown for ocean and generate what passes for a complete record.  Play with the trends, start back in the sixties with a 1960-2008 and move your way up by decades till you hit 2000-2008.  After you've done that, visit the good old boys here, pretend you have a brain, and do the math yourself.

I know, I'm an asshole.

Short-term, localized events like volcanic eruptions and dilapidated climate survey sites aren't the types of things that get folks worried.

As an observation, one of the interesting features of the google service is that you can search out sources of misinformation just as easily as you can search out valid data.

I read the article, but I do not see how you come to your conclusion. In fact the scientists conclude the opposite:

So what are you trying to say? Perhaps things are shrinking?

I tried to do that, but I'm unable to find a dropdown.

Very true, you have to be very careful when visting sites with the words "United Nations" in them!

Edit:  Terribly sorry about that dmantione, I copied the result instead of how you get there.  Here.

Brain damage is a terrible thing.

Thanks, I played a bit with it now I understand it. It's easiest to work with the plot you did generate, my graphs were similar to yours. If we take the plot and take a look at the zonal mean graph, we see that at high latitude (near Antarctica) we have have a 2.5 degrees Celcius higher temperature than the average over 1951-1980, right?

Now, the year 2008 is too little data to make any conclusions about climate, so let's use a longter period. Let us compare the average over 1998-2008 with the average over 1951-1980. Using this graph we see that the average temperature over 1998-2008 at high latitudes has been about 2.2 degrees celcius higher than the average temperature over 1951-1980.

So, the conclusion would be that temperature has risen at Antarctica and therefore it is no surprise icecaps have become smaller?

Here's a much better graph. I mimicked your exact settings but removed the ground data (we're jus talking ocean temperature, the ground data made it difficult to look at just the ocean). Based on that data you wouldn't catch any reasonable person saying "hey look, oceans have cooled!" It looks to me like it's warmed, but I would need numbers, not a picture, to feel confident about making any conclusion from this data. Morover, if you compare the last decade to that same baseline, you get a very interesting picture! Look, blanket warming across almost all the oceans!

Well, the obvious conclusion here is that most of the surface stations spread out across the US have high margins of error; nonetheless, they can still make meaningful measurements over periods of time (you can still pull out a trend from data with large error bars, obviously with lower confidence). But more importantly, with so many surface stations you can easily pull out meaningful information despite their large error bars. Also, the presence of some good measurements interspersed throughout the bad ones helps a lot.

So basically, your article about Antarctica explicitly comes to the opposite conclusion that you do; your source about ocean temperatures is easily turned around on you, and while the margins of error for so many of our surface stations are so high is mildly disturbing it doesn't invalidate their measurements - they simply need to be taken with caution.

Yeah...winter is so 20th century. I'm ready for summer year round.

We'll grow oranges in Alaska!

I've skimmed over most of this thread, and I'm not going to bother really pointing anything out in specific.  However, it is my opinion that Global Warming is indeed real, but that the predictions made by such firm proponents such as Al Gore and the original IPCC report are exaggerated and in some cases just plain outrageous.  That isn't to say it isn't an issue of serious concern that must be rectified, but that some of what is being purported is, I believe, way off base.

In the interest of playing the devil's advocate:

http://brneurosci.org/co2.html

The point with people like Al Gore is that they pretend that what scientists often consider a worst case scenario as something that will happen if people don't quickly change their habbits. That's of course not correct and can be considered misinformation. However, Al Gore's mission has never been to present the public the actual scientific situation with all its unknowns and uncertainties. Scientists agree that there exists a major problem, and what Al Gore should be credited with is raising awareness of this major problem in the largest CO2 producer on earth, the United States.

I have seen "An inconvenient truth" and I am not in any way impressed with it. It told everything we already knew for more than a decade. It was also so incredible targetted at America Public that I have no idea why the man did publish this in Europe.

One of the key take-away points from An Inconvenient Truth was that the USA contributes a large percentage (we're over-represented in the stats) to the problem - and has done relatively little to work towards an impactful solution.  So while the issue is global in scope, Al Gore may have been trying to speak to those that are most contributory to the issue.  Americans are the target audience, not just because we create a large percentage of the problem - but because we're also in a position of perhaps being able to make the biggest difference in resolving the issue.

Not to mention, we are the only major nation which refuses to acknowledge the problem. Yay for the Republican War on Science.

You guys are hopeless.

Antarctica isn't shrinking, one shelf melted, the other side of the continent is expanding.  It can be warmer just fine, ice mass is increasing, ice coverage is increasing.  It's not arguable, what's unknown is how big antarctica used to be before they started measuring it a geological microsecond back.  Maybe Antarctica was a lot bigger in the sixties, we don't have records that far back.

First thing first, anomalies aren't trends.  This is how you check 2000-2008 against 1951-1980 for global warming trend.  I pity your argument.

The oceans are cooling.  Yes, compared to 1951 they are indeed warmer, did you maybe try comparing 2008 to 2005?  You know, something actually relevant?  It could be five degrees hotter now than it was in the fifties and it wouldn't matter if it was ten degrees hotter five years ago.  We'd be cooling.  We are cooling.  Everyone knows we're cooling

You can't go nuts over a glacier melting if another glacier is expanding.  What's so bad about relics from an ice age melting in the same manner that they've been doing for thousands of years is beyond me, but I'll accept for the sake of argument that we're actually supposed to have them in the first place.  You also can't go nuts over the oceans being a degree warmer, and do try remembering that the earth isn't actually a flat square,  60-90 doesn't cover anywhere near the same area as 0-30 does.

Did you know that the sun was at a solar maximum in 2001 and again this last year?  It has an average of an 11 year cycle, we had two nice and hot ones seven years apart.  It's had 70 year gaps in visible sun spots too, heard of the mini ice age?

We still don't have temperature stations in most of Africa, take the smoothing radius down to 250km and you'll see the problem.  Yeah, that's right, we have almost no monitoring stations in the Arctic.  We know for a fact that most of our temperature monitoring stations are wrong anyway.  The half degree correction they're using to counter them isn't even close to doing the job.  They've had 15 degree differences between recorded and real temperatures for an area.

It's an exaggerated, quite possibly mythical problem.  The lot of you are nuts to be altering your lives for it, especially in such a wonderful direction.  If you want something to get excited about, the fractional reserve banking system is far more dangerous to your lives, and the Asians have just about fished the Pacific out.  Of course, niether of those are the fault of the evil empire so no one gives a shit.

Without you, psychoak, there would be no one left to argue against every scientist that isn't already being paid off by special interests representing heavy industry.  A hearty thank you!

Yay for global warming.

I like hot weather. Well, it will suck for the USA (does the word Dust Bowl ring a bell?) but since I'm from an area that will always have enough water, yay for me and sucks for the rest of the world.

Btw. did anybody else get Bingo at the denier buzzword from psychoak? Cause I don't want to share my Bingo price from the Secret Global Warming Scientist Conspiracy with anybody else.