Global Warming

Global Warming

The United States releases twenty tons of carbon monoxide per person per year. Carbon Monoxide release is a result of burning fossil fuels with an insufficient amount of oxygen that causes the formation of carbon monoxide that pollutes our environment. Every day fuel is burnt by cars, airplanes, large factories and manufacturing plants. This is causing a very large and deadly problem for our environment. When gases used on earth are released into the atmosphere they act as a blanket and trap radiation that is then redirected to earth. This concept is called the Greenhouse Effect. In this essay I will discuss the greenhouse gasses and their role in global warming.

With all the talk about the prospects of climate change, including international debates focused on the possibility of reduced gaseous emissions, one centrally important consideration often gets ignored. It turns out that the greenhouse gases that contribute to warming the earth constitute only about 1 percent of all gaseous atmospheric material. And if one considers only the subset of these gaseous molecules whose concentrations are thought to be altered by human activities, their atmospheric contribution drops to well below 1 percent. In the past 50 years we have begun to realize that these additions to our atmosphere, which come primarily from fossil fuel burning, will likely have significant impacts on human and ecosystem health and welfare.

Simply put, these ''new'' gases, despite their low relative concentrations, have and will continue to demand our attention from political and economic points-of-view. Remarkably, even though so small in percentage terms, greenhouse gases are critical to our maintenance of a planetary atmosphere conducive for life. Recognizing how such a minute portion of our atmosphere affects humans so significantly is a first step towards understanding why seemingly small quantities matter and likely a requisite step for living in a sustainable way. Quantities are small in relative percentage terms, but in net emission terms, the U.S., alone, emitted a staggering 89 billion pound of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas in 1998.

Most gases in the atmosphere do little to enhance global surface temperatures, in fact, the two most abundant gases, namely nitrogen and oxygen, contribute little or nothing to increased temperatures at the surface. However, some ...

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...erature enhancing effects, he was very much on track in that the atmosphere provides a tremendous utility in controlling our climates.

To summarize, our world faces a tremendous challenge over the next 50-100 years. While our earth is a very fit temperature for human dominance, it is just this dominance that may get the best of us by way of a more energetic and unstable environment. All the aforementioned greenhouse gases have concentrations much less than 1 percent (or equivalently, 10 parts-per-thousand) yet they have this incredible ability to disrupt life as we know it, at a blink of an eye on geologic time scales. We humans must quickly come to terms with the incredible power of these sparse gases before greater harm and damage is realized. One percent cannot be overlooked because, if it is, humanity and life itself will have to suffer the consequences.

Bibliography

Chiras, Daniel D. Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Future, 6th Ed. Sudbury: Jones and Bartlett, 2001.

Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. New York: Touchstone, 2000.

Wilson, Edward. The Future of Life. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2001.