Humans Must Adapt to Global Warming

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No one in the scientific community would argue with the premise that the earth’s climate has changed over the eons of its existence or that it will continue to change. The arguments now revolve around if mankind’s use of the environment has specifically altered our climate.

Scientists have described our world as a clump of matter that spun out of the sun to join its journey hurling though cold and empty space. Our spaceship earth would match the moon and have no climate had not molten core continued to pierce its cold crust, spewing forth chemicals that would eventually form our atmosphere, our seas and life itself (“Mcphee”).

The geological record shows a tumultuous earth, but because the events occur slowly over millions of years, we, as humans, tend to regard our world as static. During the Cambrian period, the seas level rose “at a rate of ten miles ever million years” (McPhee 186). With the world having a finite amount of water and no ice age occurring 544 million to 490 million years age, the rise of water can only be attributed to the heat of the mantel pushing the bottom of the seabed up. Over half of North America was submerge from this rise of the oceans (“McPhee”). The seas raised an average of five and a half feet every 100 years.

Today, we, as a species, may be facing similar dilemma of rising seas caused not by a bulging mantel, but by melting glaciers. New evidence shows that the ice at the fringes of Antarctica is melting; allowing larger ice sheets to flow into the ocean faster and inexorably melt. The weakening of the fringe ice shelves that are attached to the shore or the seabed has opened the door for the vast inland ice sheets to melt. Some of the same kind of shifts has been reported in some g...

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