Global Warming - a Serious Issue

Candice Wang

Geography

Mr. Matthew Alessi-Friedlander

18 September 2015

Global Warming – Serious Issue

Hello everyone! My name is Candice Wang. I am a researcher for The Geographical Society of China. I have been investigating global warming for about fourteen years now. I am really appreciative that today I have an opportunity to share my thoughts on global warming with my fellow colleagues. Global warming is the rising of the global average temperature when the atmosphere trapped too much solar radiation (Bradford, 2014), and it has been a debatable issue for many years. Nowadays, most skeptics say that global warming, being a product of human activity, is a natural process causing our atmosphere to warm up rapidly and affecting our weather, oceans, snow and ice cover, ecosystems, economy and society. These are the impacts that we can see or even feel in our lives. Skeptics, denying global warming as a product of human activity or denying it in general, are wrong. Therefore, I insist that global warming is a serious issue. Even though climate change occurs naturally, most human activities are to be blamed for the negative influence on the climate around the world. People have been burning fossil fuels and destroying forests ever since the Industrial Revolution, and these activities emit excess carbon dioxide that leads to carbon pollution and global warming.

When we talk about the global warming, the clearest signal must be the rising temperature. The long-term average temperature is rising, and each of the last three decades has been hotter than the one before (Union of the concerned scientist, 2011). According to the computer models designed to show the evolution of the climate change, the average temperature of the earth’s surface increased approximately to 1°C in the last 100 years. Moreover, the average temperature in the Arctic has risen by almost twice as much (Rowe, 2014). The increasing temperature is a fact! The simplest example is how the temperature is getting higher in Beijing during recent years. That is the result of global warming--the planet's temperature is rising, and the trend is clear and unmistakable. However, that is not the only issue. The rising temperatures also bring heat waves, spread disease, destroy the plants and animals habitat and cause the extreme weather events, from droughts to blizzards. More evidence shows that: In 2003, European heat waves killed 35,000 people (New Scientist, 2003). In the same year, temperature in India went up to 50°C (srh.noaa, 2009). In 2013, 54°C temperature in US California almost broke the highest temperature record (Fritz 2014). That means the temperatures keep increasing continuously.

The rise in temperature unquestionably is a consequence of human activity. All of the global warming impacts are due to the increased concentration of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which allow direct sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface unimpeded (National Climate Data Center, 2015); they absorb the energy and “trapping” in the lower atmosphere. The six main greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, chlorofluorocarbons and water vapor. These gases used to keep our planet warm, but the reason why they overheating it are because there always should be a balance between the amount of greenhouse gases being released into the air and the amount of carbon dioxide being removed from it. Clueless and excessive production of these gases destroyed the balance, causing the enhanced greenhouse effect. Most importantly, carbon dioxide has the biggest impact on our environment. When we compare the graph of atmospheric CO2 concentrations last 400,000 years and the graph of temperature of lower atmosphere last 400,000 years (geocraft, 2000), we can easily detect that the two graphs are almost fitting, which indicates excess CO2 emission that brings the rise in temperature. The most negative impact is being caused by the use of fossil fuels, like coal, oil, and natural gas, which are non-renewable sources of energy from the remains of plant material deposited during the earth's carboniferous period. The world now burns at least five billion tons of fossil fuels each year, fossil fuels is what makes our cars drive and produces electricity for our homes, life without these energy resources is impossible. The combustion of fossil fuels creates aforementioned danger to the environment ---- when in air, it causes air pollution; when in water, it converts into harmful acid. Deforestation makes another crucial contribution to the causes of global warming. Wood is still a necessity in our lives, but when we cut down a tree, we lose in more ways imaginable ---- we lose a carbon storehouse, which can absorb CO2 and generate the fresh oxygen, and the chopped tree sends all that carbon it had been storing right back into the air. So far, tropical deforestation produces 3 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year (Butler, 2012).