Essay About Carbon Dioxide And Greater Fuel Emissions

Explaining a Concept
Explaining a Concept
Tens of thousands of refugees flood the overcrowded Superdome in
downtown New Orleans. The roof is beginning to peel off; the situation
grows more and more grim as time passes. By now the city is flooding. Each
passing minute brings with it more water. The people inside managed to
survive the storm but were now stranded with no food or water in
increasingly deteriorating living conditions.
Day long lines formed as people awaited evacuation to nearby
Texas. Food and water are among main concerns. The unmistakable sound
of an army of helicopters flying over head will never be forgotten by many.
The entire city seemed to be lost.
As we all know by now, the Louisiana, Mississippi, and surrounding
areas was completely devastated by a category five hurricane. Hurricane
Katrina; with winds in excess of over 140mph made landfall directly on New
Orleans. The wall of water carried along with the storm, forced the levees
surrounding the city to break. Since New Orleans is completely under sea
level, the city flooded. More then 10 feet of rubble, debris, and disease rich
water, engulfed the city. The roads became rivers, instead of buses, boats
filled the streets. As the drama unfolds and a nation struggles to save their
own, another disaster is brewing in the gulf.
Hurricane Rita, another category five, is slowly inching towards the
Texas coast. Is this a phenomenon of nature? Is it be possible that two of
these deadly natural disasters to happen within days of each other? Are
these storms a result of decades of ozone depletion and global warming? A
highly debatable concept in nature, global warming, has been blamed by
many. The more frequent and severe hurricanes in the last few years has
kept many scientists busy hypothesizing.
Hurricanes, an intense oceanic weather system that possesses
minimum sustainable winds of 74mph (Crutsinger 1), have devastated costal
comminutes before documented history. In recent years, researchers have
been trying to figure out a correlation between global warming and an
increase of these natural disasters. In society today, global warming seems
to be an accepted belief. In other words, one either believes that global
warming is taking place and is a severe problem, or they believe that it is
just part of the earth?s natural cycle. Regardless, global warming does have
an affect on hurricanes.
Hurricanes form when severe thunderstorms along the west coast
of Africa drift out over warm ocean waters that are at least 80 degrees
Fahrenheit where they meet converging winds around the equator. Warm
humid ocean air begins to rise and cause warm vapor which turn into storm
clouds and drops of rain. The continuous formation of vapor from the warm
ocean air below causes a wind pattern that rotates around a relatively calm
center, the eye, like water swirling down a drain (West 3). Global warming
can affect this process in many ways.
Due to greater fuel emissions and forest clearing, the carbon
dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased dramatically. Carbon Dioxide
levels are currently higher then they have ever been in the past 400,000
years. The Carbon Dioxide acts like a blanket