The Effects of Global Warming

The Effects of Global Warming

In recent years, there are fewer controversies worldwide than the one concerning the global warming problem. According to Margaret Walsh's scientific assessment of climate change, the average surface temperature increased by about 0.6 degrees C globally with a globally increased sea level about 15 to 20 cm. In the mean time, precipitation increased about 2%. Scientists forecast that the global temperature will rise about 1.1 to 5.4 degrees C by 2100 which depends on how much greenhouse gas will be emitted during the period (2). More and more people around the world agree that the trend of global warming due to extreme conditions occurs more frequently than ten years ago which transfers the focus on the effect of global warming. How much will global warming affect human life? Clearly, climate changes caused by global warming have affected many aspects of human life such as water resources, energy use and health. This essay focuses on these three main effects of global warming.

In the first place, water is essential to life and to society's welfare and to sustainable economic growth. Plants, animals, and human settlements are sensitive to the changes of water at the land surface. So people needed to understand what in the availability and quality of water changes will affect animals, plants, and the ecosystems. For example, Margaret Walsh illustrates that climate changes affect the precipitation of different parts of America differently. On one hand, Alaskan temperatures have increased by 2 to 4 degrees C which is four times more than the global average. On the other hand, some Southern areas have cooled at the same time. Most areas in the East and the South receive more precipitation than a century ago, while other areas' amount decreased. If this phenomenon continues by another 1 to more than 4 degrees C in the future, the West will be drier and the eastern areas in US probably will have more precipitation (2). What's more, as Brekke pointed in his report Climate Changes and Water Resources Management says that both the availability and quality of water changes can affect human lives such as thermal energy production. Because limited water availability for cooling the power system. Water availability and quality also has effects on municipal and individual use, navigation support and agriculture irrigation (11).

Next, the scientific statistics shows that water availability is one of the most critical factors in ecosystem. Only 3% of the water on earth is fresh water. In that 3% fresh water, 68.7% is frozen in the ice cap and glaciers. The amount of ground water is about 30% and surface water is just about 0.3% (Scientific Assessment 145). Moreover, according to the statistics of water availability in the Climate Change and Water Resources Management report, global sea level average rising rate is about 1.7±0.5 mm every year during