But the growing effect it has on the temp. of earth is our own fault.
This has been going on forever and we are giving ourselves way to much credit if we think we can influence climate one way or the other.
I think it is being helped along by men and women.
Start with the premise that the world is finite. The earth is a bounded sphere. Furthermore, the biosphere is smaller than you might think. The crust, the ocean and the atmosphere are a small portion of the earth. 90% of life is in margins of the land where it’s not too dry, too hot or too cold, in the shallow and upper portions of the ocean, in the lower portions of the atmosphere. The atmosphere you can breathe is only a few miles thick; the entire troposphere no more than 10 miles. You can see farther than the atmosphere is thick on a clear day. Think about it, the biosphere doesn’t reach up and down endlessly. In the words of the shuttle astronauts, when you see it from space, the biosphere is a thin gossamer veneer wrapped around the planet.
Taking this further, the web of life has been in a state of dynamic equilibrium since the beginning of life on earth. Every corner of the globe is populated by exactly the right number and types of species that keeps things in balance. Recent thinking extends this idea. It’s possible that everything here is related and interdependent; biological processes, weather, geology, solar and astronomical cycles, even the position of our solar system within our galaxy. Since the beginning of the earth all have influenced one another and we now have the exquisitely balanced system that allows for our existence. However you believe this came into being; it is the objective reality to us humans and is the current unalterable state of affairs on this planet. You cannot change the laws of physics. You cannot violate the laws of thermodynamics. No matter how much you or I wish it were not so, how much you believe we can somehow circumvent the limits, how much you believe someone will come and save us before its too late, every bit of objective science in existence today only reinforces the fact that we are bound to and by the environment we live in.
Taking this to the logical extreme, if you change anything at all, anywhere, you potentially disturb the balance and the outcome is not knowable with any certainty. Would you say that this gives humanity license to change things at will? Or would it be more prudent to wait and perhaps for example apply the great law of the Iroquois – “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact on the next seven generations”. With our current state of knowledge our attempts to engineer the planet amount to a giant uncontrolled global experiment.
I will now continue and list some of what environmentalists consider to be the extreme, outrageous and even obscene environmental assaults that were begun in earnest at the beginning of the industrial revolution and continue to this day unabated and accelerating. In no particular order.
Filling in estuaries to make room for human activity. The cities we live in today were filled with waste from bank to shore in the late 19th century. The lowland areas near the rivers were considered to be wastelands and needed for commerce. First we take the prime areas and remake them for our purposes. Estuaries are the single most important, species rich, productive and necessary habitats on the planet. Inland, lowland areas serve the same purpose. In North America we filled them all in 100 years ago. The Mississippi was once miles wide. Now it’s channeled from Missouri to the Gulf of Mexico. Now we cut down mangrove swamps to make room for shrimp farms. We are on our way to fishing out the oceans. Many formerly important fisheries including species such as cod are essentially fished out. On the current trajectory, the estimate for total collapse is 2050. Shrimp farming is not a neutral activity that extends productivity or saves the oceans. The shrimp have to be fed, and fed protein. The protein comes from ocean fisheries. But unfortunately, according to physics and thermodynamics, there are inefficiencies. Meanwhile, when you created the shrimp farm by destroying the mangrove swamp, you have destroyed the ecosystem that once protected ocean species and helped clean and regenerate the ocean. You would be better off just fishing the oceans in the first place to avoid all the additional losses. So what ostensibly begins as an exercise to extend the productivity of the oceans ends up accelerating the decline. The same is true for land based farming. You add fertilizers and pesticides to gain productivity. It takes energy to make chemical fertilizer and pesticides. You gain productivity in the short term, but you do so at the cost of killing the soil, despoiling the watershed and wasting energy. You have to add more chemicals to maintain the same productivity. Eventually the soil is dead and depleted that there is no natural fertility or resistance to runaway pathogens. California strawberry farms essentially sterilize the soil with methyl bromide before every planting.