Maria Eriksson

Prof. Janet Cross

English 305

15, May, 2001

Global Warming

Earth's temperature has been experiencing significantly increases lately, and this phenomenon is dangerously threatening our planet. As our growing population increased its burning of coil and oil to produce power, the carbon locked in millions of years worth of ancient plant growth was released into the air, laying a heat retaining blanket of carbon dioxide over our planet. Climate scientists have predicted that this heat increase will disrupt weather and indeed, annual damages from weather disasters have been happening all over the earth. The glaciers are melting and rising the seas. Except for a nuclear war or a collision with an asteroid, no force has more potential to damage our planet than global warming. This is a serious issue that although the White House admits it, President Bush has decided to study it more before taking any action.

The idea that the planet was warming up as the result of human activity was just a theory, but not any. Since the Industrial revolution began in the 18th century, factories, power plants, automobiles and farms have being loading the atmosphere with heat trapping gases including carbon dioxide and methane. Since them worldwide temperatures have climbed. The 1990s were the hottest decade on records. After analyzing data going back at least decades The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, stated that the trend toward a warmer planet has undoubted begun. Scientists analyzed data on everything from air and ocean temperatures and found out that this slow but steady warming has had affected more than 420 physical processes and animal and plant species on all continents. Global warming can't be blamed for any particular heat wave or drought but scientist say that a hotter world will make extreme weathers more frequently and deadly if there is not a fast solution to the problem.

All seasons are now rarely normal. According to the Time magazine of April 9, 2001, winter snowfall and summer heat waves beat the average some years and fail to reach it in others. Ice ages have frosted the planet for thousands of years, but periods of warmth have pushed the tropics into what is now called temperate zones. Glaciers are disappearing from mountaintops around the globe. Mount Kilimanjaro has lost 75% of the ice cap since 1912. Venezuelan's mountaintops had six glaciers in 1972, but today only two remain. If continuing at the current rate, Africa's tallest peak could vanish within 15 years. Montana will lose all the glaciers in Glacier National Park by 2070. Coral reefs are dying off as the seas get too warm. There are common droughts in Asia and Africa, and the nino events, which lead devastating hurricanes in the eastern Pacific, are every time more frequent and intense, coastal areas ever more severely eroded by rising seas, rainfalls scarcer on agricultural land and ecosystems thrown out of balance.

If the rise is significantly larger, the results could be disastrous. According to Natural Resources Defense Council, scientist predict that unless greenhouse emissions are reduced substantially, temperatures in the United States will rise about 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit on average in the next100 years. With the seas rising as much as 3 ft. large coastal areas on densely populated land such as Florida, Louisiana, the Nile Delta, the Maldives, Mexico, and South America would become uninhabitable. Hundreds of millions of people would have to migrate out of unlivable regions. Agriculture will be thrown into turmoil. Public health could suffer. Rising seas could contaminate water supplies with salt. Higher levels of urban ozone, the result of stronger sunlight and warmer temperatures, could worsen respiratory distresses. More frequent hot waves could lead to a rise in heat related deaths. Warmer temperatures could widen the range of all kind of disease-carrying rodents and bugs, such as mosquitoes and ticks. The incidence of dengue fever, malaria, encephalitis, and Lyme disease would increase. Humans would have a hard time adjusting to the higher temperatures, especially in poorer countries, but for wildlife the changes could be devastating TIME magazine (22-23).

According to NRDC, The hot temperatures in our planet are disrupting all kinds of life from sea to earth. In 1998 Dallas temperatures topped 100 degrees for 29 days which destroyed crops. Same year, India experienced the worst heat shock in fifty years that killed more than 2,500 people. Fires due to dry conditions and heat waves consumed 20% of Samos Island, Greece, the last July. Pacific salmon populations fell down in 1997 and 1998, when ocean temperatures rose 6 degrees Fahrenheit. Coral reefs suffer from the lost of algae that color and nourish them. Polar bears in Hudson Bay are having fewer cubs as a result of earlier spring breakup and butterflies of western North America are relocating to higher latitudes. They have moved almost 60 miles in 100 years. These are just some the consequences of global warming, but this could worsen if we do not do anything to stop the heat trend.

Even if temperatures rise only moderately, some scientist fear that the climate will reach a point at which even a small additional increase would throw the system into a crucial change. In the World-Watch report from scientists, they predicted that if peat bogs and Arctic permafrost warm enough to start releasing the methane stored within them, that potent greenhouse would suddenly accelerate the heat-trapping process. By contrast, if melting ice caps dilute the salt content of the sea, major currents like the gulf Stream could slow or even stop as well as their warming effects on northern regions. More snowfalls reflecting more sunlight back into space could actually cause decrease on the temperatures and global warming could throw the planet into another ice age. Even if that tipping point doesn't happen, the drastic effects of global warming might be only postponed rather than avoided.

In the short run, there is not much chance of stopping global warming, not even if every country in the world ratifies the Kyoto Protocol treaty tomorrow. The treaty doesn't require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions until 2008, and by that time a great deal of damage will already have been done. But we can slow things down. If we act today, we can keep the climate from eventually reaching an unstable tipping point or can finally begin to reverse the warming trend.

There are some programs promoted by environmentalist from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that could ward off disasters Times Magazine (34-34). Using a little ingenuity, people could store carbon. By planting trees we draw CO2 from the air and give off oxygen. Decaying organic materials in the soil are rich in carbon. Limiting tilling keeps the carbon from mixing with oxygen and forming CO2. Greenhouse gases captured from smokestacks could be injected into abandon oil and gas wells to prevent warming. Alternate energy that produces no greenhouse emissions should be used.

The windmill power now replace the work of 15 coal-fired power plants and do not generate heat-trapping gases. Solar power cells convert energy from sunlight into electricity. Fuel cells by combining oxygen and hydrogen, fuel cells produce electricity giving off only water. Using the most energy-efficient technology such as driving small cars instead of the SUVs, that waist an average of 20 miles per gallon could reduce the production of heat trapping gasses.

Like any other area of science, the case of human provoked global warming has uncertainties and President Bush has used them as a reason to study the problem further rather than act. The U.N.-Sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organism in charge to sift through climate related studies from different fields and integrate them into a coherent picture, came from different countries to sign a treaty to combat climate change. Bush's dismissal from the treaty aroused protests around the world, but that didn't change his position. Those scientists need the support of every country in order to start working for the safety of all life in the planet. This is an excerpt from J. Michael Bishop, "Enemies of Promise" that makes great sense in this context. This issue should concern everyone but the U.S. president is increasing people's credibility against global warming and its effects.

IPCC scientists are studying a wide range of scenarios involving varying estimates of population and economic growth, changes in technology and other factors into computers. That process gave them about 35 estimates of how much carbon dioxide will enter the atmosphere. They can also factor in natural variations in the sun's energy and the effect of substances like dust from volcanic eruptions and particulate matter spewed from factories. They could study many more factors to discover the best way to prevent that temperatures could keep on rising if we all support them. In fact, the consequences of global warming, ecological disruption, floods, droughts and diseases are anything but abstract. The mounting body of science proving that manmade greenhouse gases trap heat in the earth's atmosphere is convincing more and more people that we must cut greenhouse pollution drastically. Now lots of people ask themselves how much hotter is the earth going to be. Or how can we stop the heat? Scientists are working hard to answer these questions and in my opinion we should trust God and then Science because they always make our lives easier.