Meghan Flanagan
Professor Green
English 1302
11 February 2016
Argumentative Dialogue: Minor Writing Project #1
The starting of this scene begins with an older couple, Justin (45) and Emily (44) engaging in conversation in their lovely home in California. It’s an ordinary Saturday morning in the Anderson household and their oldest daughter Hannah (19) is sitting at the table enjoying breakfast with thick stack of fresh chocolate chips pancakes, drenched in maple syrup and a nice glass of freshly squeezed orange juice with her family. She has recently returned home from College where she attends University of California, Santa Barbra. Justin works in environmental law while Hannah is in Marketing. Both are from upper Manhattan and settled
…show more content…
Hannah: I’ve come prepared to stop you from turning me into one of those ridiculous environmentalist you are, and have researched a little bit myself from my studies. Periods of warmer Earth history came around several hundred years before rises in CO2 levels and the industrial revolution proving that human activities of burning fossil fuels have not contributed as heavily as scientist have reported. Rather significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time, or in other words climate change is just a natural cycle.
Justin: I don’t think that its true that human activities are not playing a role in this, if population was not exploding the Earth would have gone one the way it should, but rather it’s the destructive factors such as gases released into the atmosphere making the plant unhealthy are almost entirely man-made. Forest and oceans are disappearing because of the purposes for human life. And the greenhouse effect is fairly a natural occurrence and has been around since the Earth’s creation and is what keeps the Earth’s surface temperature at something that can be manageable for humans to survive, this same process can be enhanced negatively when pollutants and gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and methane get trapped in the atmosphere heat planet Earth up. All these things state a presence of human’s
In arguments there are three major types of classifications, forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. An example of a forensic argument would be the article “The Assassination in Israel That Worked” by Roger Cohen for the New York Times. “Arguing For and Against Genetic Engineering” by Chris Seck for the Stanford Review, and “Crowd Fill Washington For Inauguration” by Carol Morello, Allison Klein, and Donna St. George for the Washington Post are great examples of deliberative and epideictic arguments, respectively. I will examine the article by Chris Seck, specifically for it’s qualifications of a deliberative argument.
First, during the last few decades the Earth is experiencing greater rate of rising temperatures due to greenhouse gases that are being produced by human activities rather than because of environmental reasons, such as solar or volcanic activities. In 2006 the President of the National Academy of Sciences stated: “There is no doubt that the Earth is warming,” also he added that people are at least partly responsible for these changes in addition to regular factors (Cicerone, par.4). Natural factors have produced climate fluctuations on Earth for several million years. People have effected an atmosphere of the Earth just for nearly one hundred years, since Industrial Revolution has begun (Revkin 340). Of course, it is unfair to say that global warming is caused entirely by humans. For example, people can not have an impact on the position of Earth in relation to the sun, or on the galactic density, or such nature events as air emissions of volcanic gases. As a result of these environmental factors, Earth usually had higher rates of temperature fluctuations during the previous million years than it has in later centuries. On the other hand, people are responsible for the highest concentration of greenhouse gases during the last 650,000 years in the atmosphere due to industrial manufacturing, driven by the increase in consumer consumption (Lindsey, par.
Climate change is a change in global temperature and regional climate patterns. At the turn of the 20th century, there has been rising issues about climate change, arguing that global warming and climate change is an issue worsened by the human race. Change in climate is a natural process in which changes from season to season and even fluxuates over thousands of years. Over the time frame of the last 650,000 years there has been seven cycles of glacial advance and retreat (Global Climate Change). It could be argued that climate change is a natural process and the Earth is suppose to change its temperature from hot to cold. Yes, that is true. However, the rate in which the temperature is changing is something this Earth has never endured. In
Mankind’s industrialization of the world has caused a drastic increase in temperature. This rise in temperature is caused by solar radiation remaining in our atmosphere because of gases produced by humans through the burning of fossil fuels, land clearing, agriculture, and other human activities. These gases block the radiation from escaping into space therefore warming our planet. The result is raising of ocean levels, extinction of species and threatening of children’s health because of disease and less freshwater to drink. While many view climate change to be a more natural occurrence than others do, scientists have proven the average temperature rise of the Earth between 0.4 and 0.8 °C over the last 100 years.
Most climate scientists agree that the main cause of global climate change is the human expansion of the greenhouse effect. This is the global warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space (climate.nasa.gov). The main gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons (climate.nasa.gov). Human activities are changing the natural greenhouse effect. The burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil has increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (climate.nasa.gov). Carbon dioxide levels have increased from 280 parts per million to 379 parts per million in the last 150 years due to human act...
Climate change, otherwise known as global warming, has grown more apparent in recent years, with increased natural disasters, significantly warmer temperatures and unreasonably long seasons. Global warming is one of the main concerns that scientists have been researching for the past century. Scientific evidence shows that global warming is caused by human behaviors. Due to the amount of human-induced carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that have been released into the air, the earth is becoming a highly poisonous place to live on. Earth’s climate has been constantly changing ever since the Industrial Revolution, when innovations began and factories were built, which emitted mass air pollution. As more technological advances continued the years after, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air also increased. According to the UPI Space Daily News, “Global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) - the main cause of global warming - increased by 45% between 1990 and 2010, and reached an all-time high of 33 billion tonnes in 2010” (Writers 1). The 1900s through the 2000s is the time period in which humans caused the most air pollution by creating vehicles and other industrial machinery. In the contemporary time period, human activities that contribute to climate change consist of hydraulic fracturing, rice cultivation, the increase of fossil fuel burning, and the rise of deforestation.
For years to come there will always be a speculation on whether the climate change has really taken place or not. Many believe that large companies launched this topic in order to benefit from it in profit, as there are also those who are convinced that this are consequences that have emerged from human mistakes in understanding the environment. As humans are struggling to trust one another whether it is just a big conspiracy or not or environment changing itself, we are slowly starting to feel the effects of climate change. Because of the gasses (CO2) that are in the air, atmosphere is getting warmer, thereby triggering the Greenhouse effect. Almost 70% of emitted gasses in air are CO2, which leads us to believe that this is the main cause of Global Warming. Since it is billions and billions of metric tons per year that are being released in air, many scientists conclude that temperature will most likely be more higher in twenty years from now, than it was in near past.
Our world is always changing, so is our climate. Some changes are apparent, others not so much. Climate change is an important issue of concern in the twenty-first century. Environment, if it changes at all, evolves so slowly that the difference cannot be seen in a human lifetime (Wearth, 2014). Mostly all scientists predicted that it would take thousands of years for the planet to warm up due to emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels called greenhouse gases. But in the past 200 years, things began to change. The rate and the amount of warming that is happening on this planet are unprecedented. Wearth says, “People did not grasp the prodigious fact that both population and industrialization were exploding in a pattern of exponential
Thesis statement: The global warming and the resultant climatic change is due to uncontrolled human exploitation of earth and its resources thereby emitting large volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Climate change is a long-term change in regional or global climate patterns. From the mid twentieth century to now, it has mostly been about a significant increase in average global temperatures. Climate change is a major issue in the world today, and a lot of people feel very differently about the cause of it. The common argument about it is whether climate change is a natural occurrence or if the recent increase in temperatures is because of humans. Climate change is a natural cycle in the Earth’s weather. Before humans started burning fossil fuels, there were still weather cycles on Earth that were as hot or hotter than what it is now. In fact, Earth’s weather now, is on pace with the previous weather patterns in history. Human emitted
While critical of global warming alarmism, this documentary does not doubt that the earth is warming. Instead, they claim that scientific evidence demonstrates that such warming is but a natural variation in earth’s climatic history, similar to the Medieval Warm Period of the Little Ice Age. The documentary uses several lines of evidence to back up this claim, including ice core data that they claim when rightly interpreted shows carbon dioxide as having a lag time when earth’s climate has warmed in the recent and distant past, making it doubtful that it could be responsible for the increase in temperature that has been observed recently. The timing of the recent warming, which was most pronounced in the late Nineteenth Century through World War II, stopped and reversed to a cooling trend in the mid-Twentieth Century, and then rapidly warmed again in the past three decades, is dissected. Since this warming began before the advent of major human sources of greenhouse gas emissions and the period of most dramatic industrial...
The commonly debated “greenhouse effect” refers to “the global average temperature increase that has been observed over the last one hundred years or more” (Spencer). President Barack Obama addressed the issue in an effort to highlight its severity, "We have to all shoulder the responsibility for keeping the planet habitable, or we’re going to suffer the consequences – together” (Leader). The earth’s increasing atmospheric and oceanic temperatures result in climate changes due to cumulative amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. As an outcome, researchers around the globe have established that the by-product of burning fossil fuels is the main culprit of the increasing temperatures. Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels have significantly increased since 1900, as shown above from a study carried out by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
These changes are becoming more prevalent in our world today, in the past 150 years. Scientists have been analyzing the causes and effects of the greenhouse effect and many other issues that global warming has presented. As John Houghton states in his book, Global Warming the Complete Briefing, on page 2, “The 1980s and 1990s were unusually warm. Globally speaking, the decades have been the warmest since accurate records began somewhat over a hundred years ago and these unusually warm years are continuing into the twenty-first century.” There are countless records that show that our world as a whole is getting warmer, and the facts cannot be disputed.
Human beings are the advanced species on the earth. The ability of our ancestors to think outside of the box is the reason why humans are the most dominant species. Once upon a time humans were same as the wild animals. The daily chore for human from the past was to hunt, eat, and survive. At present, the life of human beings is more convenient with all the inventions like cars and air conditioners. These inventions have made our lives easier but have also helped to cause global warming. The emission of carbon dioxide from these machines in the atmosphere causes global warming. Global warming, defined by Oxford dictionary is a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants (“Definition of global….”). There are several creative ideas to stop global warming and some of them have promises, for example, saving money while saving the environment. Planting and protecting the trees is a popular attempt, and it looks great on paper, this solution works well and is beneficial for the people as well as the environment.
The earth is a complex system, which continues to evolve and change. Climate change and global warming are currently popular in the political agenda. But what does “climate” really mean? The difference between weather and climate can be conveyed in a single sentence: “Climate is what you expect; weather is what you get.” Based on research of the geologic record, we know that climate change has happened throughout Earth's history and at present, ever-increasing evidence points to the roles that humans play in altering Earth systems. The Earth and its atmosphere receive heat energy from the sun; the atmospheric heat budget of the Earth depends on the balance between incoming solar radiation and outgoing radiation from the planet; which has been constant over the last few thousand years. However present evidence seems to suggest that the recent increase in temperature has been brought about by pollution of the atmosphere, in particular the release of huge amounts of carbon dioxide, mostly through Anthropogenic Forcing (human activity) and other various internal and external factors. I...