Global Warming: Global climate Change fact or fiction - Research Proposal Example

Global Warming; Global climate Change fact or fiction? The Earth’s atmosphere is all around us. It is the air that we breathe. Climate is the long-term average of a regions weather events lumped together. For example, its possible that a winter day in Buffalo, New York, could be sunny and mild, but the average weather tells us that Buffalo’s winters will mainly be cold and include snow and rain. Climate change represents a change in these long-term weather patterns. They can become warmer or colder.

Annual amounts of rainfall or snowfall can increase or decrease. Global warming refers to an average increase in the Earths temperature, which in turn causes changes in climate. A warmer Earth may lead to changes in rainfall patterns, a rise in sea level, and a wide range of impacts on plants, wildlife, and humans. When scientists talk about the issue of climate change, their concern is about global warming caused by human activities. Global warming is the rise in temperature of the earths atmosphere.

The earth is naturally warmed by rays (or radiation) from the sun, which passes through the earth’s atmosphere are reflected back out to space again. The atmospheres made up of layers of gases, some of which are called greenhouse gases. Theyre mostly natural and make up a kind of thermal blanket over the earth. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere behave much like the glass panes in a greenhouse. Sunlight enters the Earths atmosphere, passing through the blanket of greenhouse gases. As it reaches the Earths surface, land, water, and biosphere absorb the sunlight’s energy.

Once absorbed, this energy is sent back into the atmosphere. Some of the energy passes back into space, but much of it remains trapped in the atmosphere by the greenhouse gases, causing our world to heat up. In case of any excess greenhouse gases emissions, the thermal blanket gets thicker and tremendous amount of heat is absorbed and kept in the earths atmosphere. Root et al., in their paper Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants, writes: Over the past 100 years, the global average temperature has increased by approximately 0.

6 degree Celsius and is projected to continue to rise at a rapid rate. (57) Scientists know that greenhouse gases make the Earth warmer by trapping energy in the atmosphere. According to the first law of thermodynamics heat is a process by which energy is added to a system from a high-temperature source. The world gets this energy from sun. Second law of thermodynamics states that unavailability of a system’s energy to do work tends to increase over time, and approaches a maximum value at equilibrium for the isolated system which is not in equilibrium.

Earth is an isolated system and it is not in equilibrium because of the ozone depletion in stratosphere, excess ozone in the lower atmosphere and greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases are made out of: water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, etc. They are all natural gases, but extra greenhouse gases are due to the anthropogenic sources of pollution. Extra greenhouse gases are produced through activities, which release carbon dioxide by carbon cycle, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone.

These activities include; CO2 emissions from huge water bodies such as oceans, burning coal and petrol, known as fossil fuels’, cutting down of rainforests and other forests, animal waste which lets off methane, and some electrical equipments such as refrigerators that emit the chloro-fluoro carbon gases. Even a little flactuation from a mean temperature is named as extra warming and it may cause health problems for humans, plants, and animals. There are some simple solution practices to prevent greenhouse gases and help stopping global warming.

Re-use of plastic shopping bags and envelopes, re-cycling the glass bottles, jars, newspapers, tin cans can be a good practice. In my opinion people can solve this problem by education but first of all we should develop a proper education system and do necessary adjustments for this purpose. . Works Cited Root, Terry L., Jeff T. Price, Kimberly R. Hall, Stephen H. Schneider, Cynthia Rosenzweig, and J. Alan Pounds. “Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants.

” Nature 421.6918 (2003): 57-60.