Global Warming Research Paper

Submitted By cowboyrock0402
Words: 1488
Pages: 6

Thinh Nguyen
Composition II, S18
3/28/2014
Global Warming There is no issue quite like global warming. A strong consensus exists among scientists that Earth is warming up at an alarming rate. Natural processes are involved, but most of the warming is caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, mainly coal and oil. If something is not done and done soon — within the next decade or two — we will face a long list of troubles that would affect our surrounding environment. What is Global Warming? What caused it? What is its impact? How to stop it from happening? These are the main questions that need to be focused on when we analyze this issue. So first, what is Global Warming? It is the Earth’s gradual increase in the overall temperature of the atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect. In an easier way to understand, global warming is a negative change in the Earth’s climate, temperature and environment. What caused Global Warming? It is caused by the increased levels of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide and other pollutants. Even though the Earth would be a very cold place if it were not for greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere, they present too much that it went way over the amount of needed gases to maintain a balanceable temperature on the Earth atmosphere. So instead of protecting the Earth from coldness like before, the greenhouse effect is now considering life endangerment. So, what caused the level of carbon dioxide and other pollutants to increase? The answer would be natural causes if we happen to live in the Stone Age, but this is the twenty-first century and human is the one and only threat to the environment. During the Industrial Age, the growth of factories like coal factories produce Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases as waste products as they burn fossil fuels. When they release all of the wastes out, the overloaded gases would then trap a large amount of heat and light from the Sun in the Earth’s atmosphere causing climate change and global warming. Unfortunately, Coal is the main resource to generate electricity in the United States, so therefore to eliminate all of the Coal factories would be impossible, but we can think of some better ways to keep the burning of fossil fuels cleaner by wasting all of the greenhouse gases under the ground, or we can think of using more of the other resources to generate electricity like wind energy or solar energy.
Transportation is another big cause of global warming. Because of its near-total dependence on petroleum fuels, the U.S. transportation sector is responsible for about a third of the country’s climate-changing emissions. Globally, about fifteen percent of manmade carbon dioxide comes from cars, trucks, airplanes, ships and other vehicles. Cars, trucks and sport vehicles are to blame for about two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions from the U.S. transportation sector. As more vehicles hit the roads, the pollution will increase dramatically unless we create strict policies for petroleum fuels cars-reduction. Instead of using petroleum fuels, we should apply natural gas because it emits fifty percent less carbon dioxide than coal and petroleum fuels when you burn it, or we can apply electricity because it is a renewable resources and it doesn’t have to be burned to produce energy. Fortunately, fossil fuels will come to a shortage by the year of 2050, car industries all over the world are working on producing electricity car models for future use.
Deforestation, permanent destruction of forests in order to make the land available for other uses, is considered to be one of the contributing factors to global climate change. As we have learned this from Biology, trees absorb greenhouse gases (Carbon Dioxide) during the night, then produce Oxygen and perpetuate the water cycle by releasing water vapor into the atmosphere. Without trees,