Essay About World Meteorological Organization And Global Warming

Factors That Cause Global Warming
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Factors That Cause Global Warming
Erik Johnson
Axia College of University of Phoenix
COM 125 Utilizing Information in College Writing
Professor Aida Owens
February 25, 2007
Factors That Cause Global Warming
How many of us have ever lived in or visited a warm, tropical city? Whenever you were
there, did you enjoy the warm feeling of the sun touching your skin? Chances are we all “soaked
up some rays” at some point in our life and felt good about it. Now imagine the climate always
feeling that good year round. Theres nothing wrong with that, is there? So why does the media,
the government, and politicians try to scare us all into believing that global warming is a bad
thing? A good example of the scare tactics used by the media is the fight global warming ads
on television and radio. The government insists that automobile manufacturers need to make
lower emission producing vehicles. As far as politicians, they will say anything just to get your
vote. We hear so much about how we are affecting and changing the climate on Earth. Is this
an assumption or are we really contributing to the rising temperature on Earth? In order to
answer this question, we have to first understand what is global warming.
The easiest way to understand global warming is to compare it to a greenhouse. If
anybody has ever been inside a greenhouse, you know it is very warm inside. The
atmosphere above the earth traps heat in that is put off by the sun. Some of the heat is absorbed
by the earth and the rest of the heat is absorbed back in to space. This is known as the
greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is the natural warming of the Earths atmosphere.
To better understand the greenhouse effect, the next page illustrates a detailed diagram of the
greenhouse effect. “(see Figure 1)”
Figure 1. How the greenhouse effect works.
Note. From Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2006
From the diagram above, one can establish that the sun is a major contributor or factor of
warming the Earth. According to Sallie Baliunas (2005), an astrophysicist of the Harvard-
Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, “when the suns magnetism is strong, the suns
energy output is higher and the Earth is warmer.” Baliunas (2005) also mentioned that this
magnetism has been carefully measured by satellites over the past two decades, and that
scientists have been able to indirectly measure this over the past 1,000 years. This presents a
strong argument for many people who believe that global warming is something we can not
control. Most people do not mention the sun as a factor when they talk about global warming.
This may be one of the reasons why the global warming theory is debatable.
The global warming theory came about in the 1970s and 1980s from a group of
scientists. A Japanese meteorologist named Manabe Syukuro, brought up the possibility that
large quantities of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, released into the atmosphere could
affect the climate. He also believed that the burning of fossil fuels such as natural gases, coal,
and oil were the major contributors to the warming of the atmosphere. American geologist
Thomas Chamberlin and Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius also guessed that the growing
amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would lead the Earth to absorb more solar
radiation. This was believed to make the Earths temperature rise because of the solar radiation
that should have reflected back to space (Britannica, 2002). The increased amount of
greenhouse gases would then trap the excess radiation in the atmosphere thus causing the
temperature of the Earth to rise.
Since the concern of global warming began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many
nations around the world focused on policies on how to reduce the emissions of greenhouse
gases (Britannica, 2002). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed
in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment
Program (Britannica, 2002). The IPCC concluded that the past 100 years had an increase in
global average surface temperature of 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (Gray, 2006). The panel also
concluded that several future changes in climate would have a significant impact on humans and
the ecological system (Britannica, 2002).