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I think people generally need to be more sceptic about the results of science studies.

Its good to care about nature but its also good to be realistic and sceptic. mrgreen

Scepticism is good, it is not neccisarily the same as realism though.

Most results are quite blown up and are the very very unlike worst case scenario's.

It is true that different groups especially the media in general and activist have a track record of exaggerating things. It is also true that argument presents nothing other than guilt by association to dismiss some projections for climate change, including some catastrophic ones

And don't forget that earth has gone through far worse things than human pollution. The earth is a giant self-regulating system that cant be disturbed only by pollution etc.

This is true the earth has been through some really horrible things, and has many self regulatory systems that we do not fully understand. It is also true that we are in the middle of significant climate change, and most such climate changes in earth's history have been accompanied by mass extinctions. Earth may be fine, life may go on, but that doesn't mean we will (although I think some humans would make it though just about anything since we are pretty damn adaptable, still wouldn't really like to see 90% of mankind die out, plus massive changes could be a catalyst for nuclear war which scares me a lot more than global warming and could actually wipe us all out). It is also important to note that climate on earth oscillates and we are on an upswing right now, all we have to do is push a little at one peak and (even if pollution isn't the primary cause) to make the world a pretty unpleasant place for humans. Also note that there are a lot of things going on besides pollution.
A--- You have CO2 and other greenhouse gases (which I have already discussed in detail)
B--- You have mass extinctions and deforestation (which affects at least some of earth's regulatory abilities)
C--- You have other stuff which we barely understand going on (if you want to be paranoid consider our effect on the evolution of bateria)

We know that certain things like increased CO2 emission can raise global temperature (although the scope and effect are argued). We know plants help regulate this (but we continue mass deforestation). We know algea and plankton (and some bacteria) colonies in the ocean play an even larger role in regulating these things than forests do (although their whole habitat could be thrown into utter chaos with glacial melting affecting sea current and the salinity of water). First link shows some of the importance of plankton (about half of CO2 consuption and oxygen production is due to it). The second shows the ocean currents which play are large role in supporting the enviroment that planton lives in. It is theorized that glacial melting could disrupt this causing catastrophy (although this is still somewhat speculative)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/07/040728085622.htm
http://www.grida.no/climate/vital/32.htm
So there are several factors beyond just pollution contributing to the threat of Global Warming.

So if the temperatures are indeed rising it would mean that there's a larger cause and lets say pollution is only a minor contributor to it.

Another point is our data. We rely on relatively accurate data that go back a few hundred years. In Geological time that means nothing... So its quite impossible to predict the actual effect of pollution etc.

Calling you here. Yes we only have accurate first hand recordings going back a couple hundred years but we have methods to measure atmosphere make-up, and temperature going back much further than that. For details on how we do it, do some seaching on the following links.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/paleo.html
http://vathena.arc.nasa.gov/curric/land/global/climchng.html#know


N.B. Pollution is a rather human health related problem (like people mentioned before) than a head cause for global warming.
arrow Think about it, post and argue...

Good point, my purpose with the chart was just to show that there is a correlation rather than explain exactly what it is.

The chart is pretty chaotic (which should be expect since CO2 levels are not the only thing affecting temperature).

When I looked at the chart I noticed some points where the CO2 levels seemed to change before temperature(if you look at the bit right at the end of the chart you should be able to see this, the CO2 goes down right before temp), and others where it happened after (like you said).

The chart is chaotic enought that without the original data to work with I can't really tell if there is an overall trend one way or the other.