Global Warming

"All across the world, in every kind of environment and region known to man, increasingly dangerous weather patterns and devastating storms are abruptly putting an end to the long-running debate over whether or not climate change is real. Not only is it real, it's here, and its effects are giving rise to a frighteningly new global phenomenon: the man-made natural disaster" (Barak Obama). Global warming is one of the most important and uncomfortable topics of today's society. It is crucial to understand the process of global warming, because people need to know that what they are doing could have serious consequence to life on our planet.

Before we can understand global warming, we have to understand what the greenhouse effect is, and how they differ. The greenhouse effect is the name applied to the natural process which causes the surface of the Earth to be warmer than it would have been in the absence of an atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is like a thermal blanket which traps heat emitted from the Earth's surface, thereby warming and insulating the Earth. Without the natural greenhouse effect, the earth's climate would be about 60 degrees cooler, and many living things including humans, would not be able to survive. Global warming is the name given to an expected increase in the magnitude of the greenhouse effect, where the surface of the Earth will almost inevitably become hotter than it is now. The greenhouse effect, unlike global warming, is not a danger to our planets wellbeing.

Interestingly enough, many people think that humans are the cause of global warming. According to the National Academy of Sciences, the Earth's surface temperature has risen by about one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, with accelerated warming during the past two decades. There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming over the last fifty years is attributable to human activities. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, humans have developed many inventions that burn fossil fuels. Climate scientists believe that when we constantly burn these fossil fuels, we contribute to the increase of concentration of carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide gasses in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide levels have increased twenty-eight percent in the past century due to the fossil fuels mass burning. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which consists of over 200 of the worlds leading climate scientists) believes that by the end of the twenty-fist century, the concentration will increase by another forty percent. Humans are considered one of the main causes for the planets global warming.

There are many threatening consequences of the heating of the Earth's climate. First, with these warm temperatures, parts of the polar ice caps could melt away causing a rise of the sea level. Rising sea levels, an estimated six feet over the next hundred years or sooner, will cause massive devastation and economic devastation to population centers worldwide such as New York, Maryland, and California. Flooding as a result of coastal storm surges will affect the lives of up to two-hundred million people by the 2080s (Environmental Issues). Second, farming problems would appear. The change in weather conditions (temperature, radiation, and water) will have a dramatic effect on agriculture, such as intense flooding or long drought in some of the world's most important farming areas. Also:

"Super powerful hurricanes, fueled by warmer ocean temperatures