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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For instance, at the turn of the 20th century the Earth was very cold. During the first decade of the 20th century the Earth was at it’s coldest it has been in the last 11,300 years. Now however, during the first decade of the 21 century the temperature is hotter than seventy-five percent of the last 11,300 years. If not made for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting colder (Brumfield). This clearly shows that as the years went by man has had a profound effect on the Earth’s climate. If we do not try to change the way we live, then future generations will be living in a completely different world than ours.
In the beginning of the creation of Earth volcanoes erupted all over the planet. During this period there was a time where a brief cooling period was allowed to take place. When this period took place evaporation caused a downpour of rain which flooded the ocean creating the ocean. At the time that ocean was averaged at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Around this same time an asteroid so powerful hit the Earth knocking off a large chunk of it. This chunk became the moon which at the time was twice as close as it is today. The hitting of the planet Earth cause such a shake that many new undersea volcanoes began spewing forth molten rock and gasses. These gasses and other particles formed on the oceans surface and with the moon being so close were smashed together by strong and violent waves.
Today, some scientists are skeptical about the consensus on climate change. This can be compared to a situation in ancient times, where the majority of people believed the earth was flat, and only a minority dared to question that consensus. These challengers note that something not known is how much does the earth’s atmosphere respond to added carbon dioxide (McNider and Christy). This means that no one has any idea of what CO2 levels did to the earth’s climate before meaningful history. So, as many sci...
Bintanja, R., G.J. Van Oldenborgh, S. S. Drijfhout, B. Wouters, and C. A. Katsman. "Important Role for Ocean Warming and Increased Ice-shelf Melt in Antarctic Sea-ice Expansion." Nature.Com. 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited, 31 Mar. 2013. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.
The Earth's climate has changed significantly throughout history. In the last 700,000 years there have been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat. With the abrupt end of the last ice age approximately 7,000 years ago the beginning of the modern climate era was born. In the last century the global sea level has risen 17cm. All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years, having occurred since 1981 and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years. There is no denying global warming. Once considered a conspiracy theory by the world’s leading governments, industries and populations; global warming
Climate change and Global Warming are out of control. This means that, no matter what policies, processes or actions are implemented, the Earth as we know it will never be the same again. There is significant evidence to support this hypothesis. The dilemma becomes whether we can limit the damage and adapt to a new status quo or not. Rising sea levels and the damage caused by this phenomenon has irreversible impacts on coastlines worldwide. Damage to sensitive reef systems cannot be fixed. This also has permanent impacts of the ecology not just of those immediate areas but also the ocean as a whole.
Nearly two hundred well-known scientific corporations, including NASA, the American Medical Association, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are all in agreement that recent changes in the earth’s climate are due largely to human activities. An estimated ninety-seven percent of climate scientists are also in consensus that those changes are a result of human activity.
“Sea Level Rise And Climate Change Exiles: A Possible Solution.” Pg. 24-25. Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists 71.2 (2015): 21-28. Academic Search Premier. Web. May 05, 2015. http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail/detail?vid=3&sid=3e7741d7-90c0-4cde-a385-0b99616c0ab4%40sessionmgr113&hid=113&hid=113&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGI2ZQ%3d%3d#db=f5h&AN=101327662
There is no longer any question that our world climate has changed (King, 2004). Over the last 100 years, "temperatures have risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius and global sea level has risen by about 20cm" (K...
Interactions between human and the ecosystem have been operating for millenniums, and are impossible to eliminate, as each depends on the other in order to survive and flourish. However, as modern technology advances, as well as the increase in the world’s population, the need for natural resources begin to rise to an alarming rate which has started to gradually destroy the ecosystem. Recently, there has been an increase of sea levels in region whilst other rain-bounty areas have begun to experience their first droughts. This phenomenon is known as climate change. Climatologists have concluded that human activity has played a major role in contributing to the changes, therefore requiring extreme measures before this phenomenon evolves into a catastrophe. In this essay, we will discuss human activities that contributed to climate change, as well as addressing possible solutions to the phenomenon.
For these reasons, global warming stands as one of the most daunting policy issues facing our world today. This is compounded by the debate over the very existence of climate change. While countless sources of empirical evidence testify to the very real presence of climate change the world over, considerable denial of the phenomenon still exists. The argument has been made that evidence about climate change is a gross overstatement, or in some cases, a complete fabrication. Despite the evidence to the contrary, many interest groups with considerable political clout have successfully perpetuated the argument that documented changes in the environment are a product of natural cyclical changes in climate, and are not associated with human activities. However, even the acceptance of this particular brand of reality is no grounds for the disregard of environmental consciousness. Even if one accepts the premise that recent climate change is not resultant of human activity, the rationale behind environmental conservation remains ...
This argument suggests that because the climate has been more extreme in the past we shouldn't worry about it changing. It conveniently ignores the fact that if we reached either past climate extreme, much of our society and ecology would not survive.
Scientists appear to have become aware of the issue of rising sea levels in the mid to late 1980s. An article published in Science News in 1987 predicted that “global warming… will cause… the world's oceans to expand, raising the average sea level by 4 to 8 centimeters in the next 40 years” (Monastersky). Though 4 to 8 centimeters sounds like a miniscule amount in relation to the vastness of the world’s oceans, this early article disturbed many readers. Many for this reason: early stud...
One of the major effects of global warming is the rise of sea level due to thermal expansion of the ocean, in addition to the melting of land ice. Now there are dozens of land areas that sit well below sea level and the majority of those land areas are very well populated. At least 40 percent of the world 's population lives within 62 miles of the ocean, putting millions of lives and billions of dollars ' worth of property and infrastructure at risk. (Juliet Christian-Smith, 2011) This means if the sea level rises to the projected level of 25 meters (82 feet) half of the world will retreat back to the ocean. (Rohrer, 2007) Also rising sea levels means higher tides and storm surges riding on ever-higher seas which are more dangerous to people and coastal inf...
While critical of global warming alarmism, this documentary does not doubt that the earth is warming. Instead, they claim that scientific evidence demonstrates that such warming is but a natural variation in earth’s climatic history, similar to the Medieval Warm Period of the Little Ice Age. The documentary uses several lines of evidence to back up this claim, including ice core data that they claim when rightly interpreted shows carbon dioxide as having a lag time when earth’s climate has warmed in the recent and distant past, making it doubtful that it could be responsible for the increase in temperature that has been observed recently. The timing of the recent warming, which was most pronounced in the late Nineteenth Century through World War II, stopped and reversed to a cooling trend in the mid-Twentieth Century, and then rapidly warmed again in the past three decades, is dissected. Since this warming began before the advent of major human sources of greenhouse gas emissions and the period of most dramatic industrial...