Factors That Cause Global Warming

Factors That Cause Global Warming

Erik Johnson

Axia College of University of Phoenix

COM 125 Utilizing Information in College Writing

Professor Aida Owens

February 25, 2007

Factors That Cause Global Warming

How many of us have ever lived in or visited a warm, tropical city? Whenever you were

there, did you enjoy the warm feeling of the sun touching your skin? Chances are we all "soaked

up some rays" at some point in our life and felt good about it. Now imagine the climate always

feeling that good year round. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? So why does the media,

the government, and politicians try to scare us all into believing that global warming is a bad

thing? A good example of the scare tactics used by the media is the fight global warming ads

on television and radio. The government insists that automobile manufacturers need to make

lower emission producing vehicles. As far as politicians, they will say anything just to get your

vote. We hear so much about how we are affecting and changing the climate on Earth. Is this

an assumption or are we really contributing to the rising temperature on Earth? In order to

answer this question, we have to first understand what is global warming.

The easiest way to understand global warming is to compare it to a greenhouse. If

anybody has ever been inside a greenhouse, you know it is very warm inside. The

atmosphere above the earth traps heat in that is put off by the sun. Some of the heat is absorbed

by the earth and the rest of the heat is absorbed back in to space. This is known as the

greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is the natural warming of the Earth's atmosphere.

To better understand the greenhouse effect, the next page illustrates a detailed diagram of the

greenhouse effect. "(see Figure 1)"

Figure 1. How the greenhouse effect works.

Note. From Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2006

From the diagram above, one can establish that the sun is a major contributor or factor of

warming the Earth. According to Sallie Baliunas (2005), an astrophysicist of the Harvard-

Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, "when the sun's magnetism is strong, the sun's

energy output is higher and the Earth is warmer." Baliunas (2005) also mentioned that this

magnetism has been carefully measured by satellites over the past two decades, and that

scientists have been able to indirectly measure this over the past 1,000 years. This presents a

strong argument for many people who believe that global warming is something we can not

control. Most people do not mention the sun as a factor when they talk about global warming.

This may be one of the reasons why the global warming theory is debatable.

The global warming theory came about in the 1970s and 1980s from a group of

scientists. A Japanese meteorologist named Manabe Syukuro, brought up the possibility that

large quantities of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, released into the atmosphere could

affect the climate. He also believed that the burning of fossil fuels such as natural gases, coal,

and oil were the major contributors to the warming of the atmosphere. American geologist

Thomas Chamberlin and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius also guessed that the growing

amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would lead the Earth to absorb more solar

radiation. This was believed to make the Earth's temperature rise because of the solar radiation

that should have reflected back to space (Britannica, 2002). The increased amount of

greenhouse gases would then trap the excess radiation in the atmosphere thus causing the

temperature of the Earth to rise.

Since the concern of global warming began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many

nations around the world focused on policies on how to reduce the emissions of greenhouse

gases (Britannica, 2002). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed

in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment

Program (Britannica, 2002). The IPCC concluded that the past 100 years had an increase in

global average surface temperature of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (Gray, 2006). The panel also

concluded that several future changes in climate would have a significant impact on humans and

the ecological system (Britannica, 2002).