Human Activity: The Driving Force Behind Climate Change

Climate change (global warming) is a problematic issue, and this problem is growing. To make matters worse, this problem is a manifestation of human activities. People’s actions are resulting in devastating impacts to the environment. Unfortunately, not everyone concurs to this reasoning. Even with empirical data presented, there are skeptics who attribute climate change to natural causes rather than man-made causes. In order to prevent global warming from exacerbating, it is crucial for people to understand that climate change is happening; it is changing “even more radically,” (Emanuel 6) than ever, and humanity is the cause. As of recent years, global warming has made a significant impact on Earth (Weeks, “Climate Change” 523). “Certain
Climate change caused by people is known as anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change (Reuss 35). Due to increased human activity, carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas which traps heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, concentrations in the atmosphere have reached to its highest in three million years (Weeks “Climate Change” 521), and the concentrations are proliferating. With an abundance of carbon dioxide already emitted, Kevin Trenberth, a scientist from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, asserted that, “Even if we all decided to stop emitting CO2 immediately, it would take at least 20 years to start putting new [low-carbon or carbon-free] systems in place, and another 50 years for the climate to adjust (qtd. in Weeks, “Climate Change”
According to the International Agency, “More than 40 percent of global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2010 came from electricity and heat generation” (qtd. in Weeks, “Climate Change” 528). Meanwhile, natural events, such as wildfires and volcanic eruptions, account for less than 10% of carbon dioxide emission (528). Furthermore, there are cases where human emissions of greenhouse gases cause other factors to amplify the progress of climate change (Reuss 35). When humans emit greenhouse gases and cause the global temperature to rise, ice melts (35). As a result of the ice melting, the earth has less ice to reflect light back into outer space (35). Consequently, the earth absorbs more sunlight and increases the global temperature. Even indirect actions, such as deforestation, contribute to climate change (35). When deforestation occurs, there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (35). This is because there are less trees to undergo a process call carbon sequestration—the act of absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it to oxygen (35). Additionally, the technology used to cut down trees operates on fossil fuels, and this contributes to the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere