Assignment: Global Warming

GLOBAL WARMING The term global warming was first used in its modern sense in a science paper dated 8th August 1975 in the journal science called “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” The words used by Broker were new and they represented a convincing recognition that there was an amount of warming in the climate. Scientists previously used the phrase “inadvertent climate modification” because even though it was realized that humans could bring about a change in the environment, no-one was particularly sure as to which direction it was going. The word Global Warming was first used by National Academy of Sciences in 1979 in a paper called The Charney Report, which wrote: “If there is a continuous increase in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, there’ll be no reason to doubt that climate changes will come up and no reason to believe that these changes will be close to insignificant.” The report made a contrast between referring to changes in surface temperature as Global Warming while referring to various other changes caused by increased CO2 as climate change. Global warming became more commonly popular basically after 1988 when a NASA climate scientist James Hansen used the term in a demonstration to congress. He said, “Global warming has reached to such a stage that we can describe it with a great degree of confidence as a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and the noticed warming.” His statement was widely reported and the word ‘Global Warming’ was ordinarily used in public disclose and by the press. Reference: http://www.projectearth.net/Project/Details/1508

Global warming has been one of the biggest environmental and humanitarian crises since the late 19th century. Decades have been spent by the scientists to figure out what actually is causing global warming. Natural cycles and events that are known to influence climate have been looked upon. But the pattern and amount of warming that has been measured cannot be explained only by these factors. The only explainable way is to take into consideration the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere due to human activities. A group of scientists called the ‘Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ or IPCC was formed by the United Nations to bring all this information together. Latest scientific findings are reviewed every few years by the IPCC meetings and reports are written summarizing all that is known about global warming. Every report puts forward an agreement, or a consensus among hundreds of major leading scientists. The first thing that scientists found out is that warming is caused by several greenhouse gases, which are emitted by humans in a number of ways. Most of them come from burning of fossil fuels in factories, cars and electricity production. Carbon Dioxide or CO2 is the gas responsible for most of the warming. Methane discharged from landfills and agriculture, mainly from digestive systems of grazing animals, nitrous oxide released from fertilizers, gases which are used for industrial processes and refrigeration, and cutting down of forests that would otherwise store CO2 are some other contributors of global warming. The effect of green house gases such as carbon dioxide, deforestation, emissions from burning fossil fuels, trapping of unnecessary heat that should otherwise escape from the earth, causing a rise in its average surface temperature is known as global warming. It is also called the greenhouse effect. Heat trapping carbon dioxide overloads the earth’s atmosphere and causes large scale disruptions and other disastrous consequences. Warming of the climatic system is absolute, scientists being decisive that it is primarily due to increasing concentrations of green house gases contributed by various human activities of polluting the environment. Different heat-trapping abilities are found in different greenhouse gases. Some of...