Does Global Warming Exist?

[Lucky]

Well. I'm not much for the science of it all but I begin to beleive that global warming is real when the temperature is above freezing in Canada in January. Reached 11C in Toronto yesterday.
...
Well, I am sweating and stinking more than I used to.

Local weather changes are not neccessarely an indication for global warming. The climate changes due to global warming, which we are definitely experiencing at an increasing rate right now, will have all kinds of different effects in different regions. So even if the average temperature in, let´s say, Europe has increased over the last 100 years, you can´t make any conclusions over global warming based on this data nor can you predict the climate changes in other places. In Greenland for example, the average temperature has decreased during recorded weather history there.
The most important and obvious effect that Global Warming is causing, are the drastic changes in local climate everywhere, because an increase in the average temperature leads to an increased rate of climate changes.
The El Nino effect on the west coast of South America had never been so strong in recorded history, the savannas in Africa are experiencing heavy drought in one year and in the next year the plains are flooded. Local weather is making drastic changes everywhere, we had -10°C and 20cm snow during christmas holidays, now we have +15 to +20°C and stormy weather (almost beaufort 8).Crazy ! The agroculture of the fertile plains in Russia and Kasachstan is experiencing heavy fluctiations of the harvest every year. And this list goes on and on, not even mentioning the drastic increase in weather catastophes like hurricanes, tornados, etc.
The record of events like these date back several hundred years and there is nothing recorded compared to the climate changes every year. Again the problem are not the climate changes but the increasing rate of them happening. The continuity of our weather is lost.

The C02 theory looks sound enough. Looking into temperature and C02 levels in the past few million years there certainly seems to be a link. The world is actually getting colder in the long term. The problem would be if any change (hotter or colder) were to take place so quickly that neither human beings nor nature could adjust.

This isn´t quite correct. True, the earth itself is in state of cooling right now. But if the natural cycle of the last hundreds of million years would continue, we should experience the beginning of another ice-age right now. Instead the records of the last 1000 years show that the temperature is rising, with a drastic increase over the last 100years.
Anyway, to a quick climate change the humans wouldn´t adjust but nature would! We humans tend to think that we are stronger than nature, but life itself will definitely continue even if drastic changes occur! (see end of the dinosaurs)

In the meantime the fact that 90% of oil reserves are in the Middle East should make Western Countries look for alternatives anyway.

This is also not right. The greatest !known! resources of fossil fuels including oil are still buried under the ice in Antarctica. Antarctica is much bigger than the Middle East and it had been a thriving jungle millions of years ago.

So in short, I don't think global warming exists in the sense that humans are having an adverse effect on the global energy balance. I believe there are many harmful things we are doing to the environment, but to some degree the environment has a way of dealing with it.

Yeah right! :crazyeyes
And the ice-ages didn´t exist!
The geological formations in northern Europe (Germany too) are a scientifical proof for the advancing glaciers. You have probably never heard anything about moraines and think that the Norwegian fiords and the giant erratic boulders in Central Europe have been created by His Almighty himself!
No offense to all you religious people out there though, believe in what you like!

You can't determine if this "global warming" exists -- how long in to the past has our records of the temperatures/etc existed? Not over a few hundred years...
The earth has been around some five-six billion years, and we've recorded a teeny-tiny little piece of that.

There are a lot of different methods of measuring the development of earth´s climate and we can gain results from some 100 over several millenia upt to several million years ago.
Recorded weather gives us data for up to 200 years.
Tree investigation (rings) yield up to several hundred years.
The ice deep inside glaciers is several thousand years old. Several science teams investigate this ice in Greenland, Antarctica and other glaciers.
Other methods including spectroscopic examinations of old fossil fuel or even examination of animal fossils (dinosaur bones, preserved insects etc.) yields valuable data dating back several millions of years, even several hundreds of millions.
So there is sufficient data to correlate theories of the development of the climate and several of these theories, i.e. the ice-age/warm-age cycle, are proven and accepted.
On the other hand this data is also just from certain parts of the world, therefore not a conclusion for the world climate.

Development of CO2 concentration and temperature over the last ice-age/warm-age cycles:

To summarize this rather long post:
Global Warming definitely exists as part of the earth climate cycle. Right now we are at a peak in temperature and CO2. If the cycle would continue its natural course, we should have experienced the turning point in both temperature and CO2 concentration. But proven data of the recent 1000 years definitely shows a highly abnormal increase in CO2, with predictions showing no end of this upward slope, and an unusual continuity of the temperature in these 1000 years with a drastic increase in the last 100 years. These events do NOT follow the natural cycle of earth´s climate. Computer models cannot fit this curve without taking the 'input' of the humans into account. Our relatively small influence has definitely upset the balance of our climate.
How this imbalance will turn out in the end and what effects it will have on our ecosystem is the more interesting part to discuss, as there is a wide range of theories (from America´s "nothing will change" to Greenpeace´s "Apocalypse mentality").
This is by far not all I can say about this topic but it´s good enough, I hope.

 

[Lucky]

After discussing it with the forum software, here is my attachment.
It didn´t like it in the first try.

I have attached a .pdf file with a summary of a recent international "Panel on Climate Change" supported by the UN. It has the proven charts of recent developments and most of the generally accepted future predictions. (~450kB)

EDIT: Hey, what´s up with the forum. My attachment is just 453.018 Byte and it doesn´t want to take it.

Well, I´ve put it up for download here:
IPCC summary