Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases

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Global Warming and Greenhouse Gases

Humans are polluting our atmosphere causing the Greenhouse Effect. What’s the Greenhouse Effect? “The Greenhouse Effect can be visualized as follows: imagine that Earth has been encircled by a giant glass sphere. The heat of the sun penetrates through the glass. Some of the heat is absorbed by the Earth, and some is radiated back towards space. The radiated heat reaches the glass sphere and is prevented from dispersing any further”(Global Warming The Facts). This makes the heat bounce back towards the Earth, which heats it up tremendously.

The warming of the Earth is not a good thing. If the ice caps on the mountaintops were to melt it would raise the ocean by eight feet and many lives would be lost. Some people might say “so what eight feet.” “The worst possible scenario with this problem would be mass flooding in low lying areas of the Earth including many islands in the ocean which would basically disappear, most of Florida would be underwater, all coastline cities, and river deltas such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, China, Egypt, Louisiana, and other parts of the U.S.”(Greenhouse Effect, 1998). All of this destruction does not even include what would happen to the Earth’s weather. There would be more hurricanes, tropical storms, extreme temperatures and droughts. Take a second now and just think how that would ruin our food supply. Would we all starve to death? I do not know but I am sure that would not be eating as well as we do today.

Now what causes all this chaos is a mixture of gases. “Greenhouse gases are transparent to certain wavelengths of the suns radiant energy, allowing them to penetrate deep into the atmosphere or all the way into the Earth’s surfac...

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...omplain. We all need to do something, if not for us then for our children, they are going to be the one’s who have to clean up our mess. Now can you sleep at night?

Works Cited

Chris T. and Colin G.; “The Greenhouse Effect.” 1 January 1998.

http://www.geocites.com/Athens/Parthenon/5173/greenhouse effect.html

9/8/1998 12:43 PM

“Greenpeace’s International Campaign to Save the Climate.” 25 August 1998.

http://www.greenpeace.org/~climate/climatemain.html

9/8/1998 12:57 PM

Mate, John; “Global Warming…The FACTS.” 19 May 1995

http://rtk.net/E10101T659

11/18/1998 10:36 P.M.

Jaffe, Mark; “What Hath Man Wrought?” 1995.

http://sln.fi.edu/inquirer/warming.html

10/27/1998 9:09 P.M.

U of M, Courtesy of NASA; “Glossary: Greenhouse Gas.” 1998

http://www.windows.umich.edu/glossary/glossarygreenhousegas.html

11/17/1998 12:11 P.M.

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