Global Warming Essay, Research Paper

We are all going to die. Run, Chicken Little, the sky is falling! We have all heard the horror story of global warming, some of us so much that by now it seems only a fanciful tale imposed upon the world by radical environmentalists. Despite what little evidence we see of global warming in our day-to-day lives, it is a major issue in today?s society. The leaders of hundreds of countries have met to discuss the problem and what is to be done about it in the future. Air emissions regulations have been put into place in many countries to reduce to the amount of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. Thousands of scientists study the possible effects of global warming on the Earth, and students attend lectures like the one given by Dr. Doron Nof in order to learn more about the possibility of such climate change. Global warming is a difficult issue to address. Researchers believe that it is caused largely in part by CO2, which is emitted into the atmosphere in large quantities by humans now. Dr. Nof spoke of CO2 in the atmosphere and ocean?s absorption of seventy percent of it. He commented that neither he nor anyone else knows exactly what effects this will have on the ocean, on the Earth, and on global warming. While Dr. Nof argued that climate change is a major problem, he offered no solution to stop the rising global temperature. This poses many questions: Are CO2 and the Earth?s temperature related? Are humans responsible for the reported climate change? And lastly, how important of a problem really is global warming? Researchers stress the relationship between CO2 and the global temperature, and worry that the ongoing rise in the air?s CO2 concentration may lead to catastrophic global warming. There is very little reason to believe that this event will ever happen, however, because observations of historical change in air temperature and the atmosphere?s CO2 content suggest that it is change in climate that drives change in CO2 concentration and not the other way around. According to a study of the global warmings that ended the last three ice ages, for example, Fischer et al. found that air temperature always rose first, followed by an increase in atmospheric CO2 around 400 to 1000 years later. Similarly, Petit et al. (1999) observed that for every one of the global inceptions of the past half-million years, air temperature consistently dropped before the air?s CO2 content did, and that the CO2 decreases trailed the temperature decreases by several thousand years. There are also a number of studies that display a complete uncoupling of global air temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere during periods of significant climate change (Cheddadi et al., 1998; Raymo et al., 1998; Indermuhle et al., 1999). Thus, there are no historical records for CO2 induced climate change, but we find many examples of climate change altering atmospheric CO2 content. Having ruled out the likelihood of human-induced climate change, we should now look at the possibility of global warming itself posing a threat to the Earth, and of what importance this problem may be. In a study by Goklany (2000), the author ?examines the validity of the assertion that anthropogenic climate change is the overriding environmental concern facing the globe today,? by looking at recent trends in different climate-sensitive phenomena, including global death rates due to parasitic diseases and infection, deaths in the United States due to storms and floods, global food security, and the biomass of northern forests. The author then evaluated the estimated global impact of global warming on deforestation, biodiversity, food security, and human health years in the future, based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?s 1995 Impact Assessment. The author found that over the next few decades, the climate-sensitive phenomena examined will be of a much smaller magnitude of importance than those phenomena due to other stressors of society, such as population growth, poverty, land conversion, and rates of infections and parasitic diseases not relating to the climate. The author declared that ?eliminating anthropogenic climate change, even if feasible, would ? for the next several decades ? do little to reduce the much larger baseline rates of global deforestation, biodiversity loss, and infectious and parasitic diseases.? Therefore, the author concludes that climate change ?is not today ? nor [is] likely to be in the foreseeable future ? as urgent as other current environmental and public health problems.? These studies clearly disprove the theory of human-induced global warming due to the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, and show more pressing global problems that need to be addressed in the future. This being the case, we must ask ourselves why there so much anxiety over potential future global warming. The only reason I can see for anxiety is that it seems global warming really has become the largest threat of all to our future, simply because it diverts our attention from the important environmental issues of our day, so that we fail to address the truly relevant problems that already threaten our lives.

Bibliography

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