Carbon Emission and Global Warming (1 of 2)
Surprising Facts about Carbon Emission and Global Warming
Also, if you are interested in listening to this episode instead, here is the link to it: carbon emission and global warming 1 of 2
Some people just don’t believe that climate change is real, but why though?
There are several reasons, and some most popular ones are people’s own experiences and lack of knowledge about evidence and studies proving the negative effects of global warming.
First, I would like to discuss why some people do not believe global warming exists because of their own experiences. For instance, some people in the Midwestern US may point out that there’s still snow in the winter. As long as the weather they observe remains the same, they assume that climate change can’t exist. Yet, those who believe climate change exists point out that the seasonal weather did change in recent years. Some living in the Midwest may notice that while winters became a little milder, summers start earlier and become hotter and more humid.
The second reason why some people are skeptical about global warming is that they are unaware of the causes of it. While some evidence shows that climate change occurred because of human intervention such as pollution, other studies dispute the claim. Deniers of climate change also claim that global warming no longer exists as the average global temperature has remained consistent for several decades and that teachers should therefore no longer talk about global warming in schools.
However, there are many surprising statistics about the effects of global warming. For example, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has reached maximum level across 3 million years; 390 billion tons of glacial ice and snow disappear each year; and, people have cleared 30% of all the forest cover on the planet during the exploitation of forests. Do those numbers sound startling to you? Well, they should be. Based on those numbers, it is not hard to tell how human behaviors have led to global warming and harmed our planet.
Debates over whether Global Warming is Occurring
Global warming is an unarguable fact to some of us, but it may not be the case for other people. (such as Donald Trump?) Why though? This question has been bothering me since I got to know the term “global warming”. For the skeptics of global warming, it is just an untrue theory that some politicians came up to create fear among the public and to reap benefits.
The first and most popular argument of the skeptics is that the earth’s climate has been constantly changing. This could be supported by evidence stating that the earth’s climate has been cooling and warming throughout its 4.5-billion-year history. Even in the most drastic phrases, caused ice ages and the “hot ages”. It is definitely true that the earth’s climate has been changing since its formation, but the changes that are happening now are human-induced. When looking at the carbon emission rate since the last few centuries, we can notice several spikes. These spikes correspond to the times of the industrial revolutions when coal and other fossil fuels were burnt to allow the steam engine to function properly.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
The second controversy is that people never feel the impacts of global warming in their daily lives. Indeed, while the summers and heat waves have been increasingly hotter and stronger each year.
The problem is, however, that the severity gradually increases and the heat waves do not come all at once. Thus, without looking at scientific data, it is hard to realize how much we have pushed Earth beyond its natural limits. Additionally, winters are still as cold as or colder than they were before since the last century, convincing some people that global warming is not occurring. It is challenging to refute this argument because there is currently no perfect theory or hypophysis to explain why the winters have grown colder. The only rebuttal that could be made is extremely weak, which states that the weather, not the climate, affects the change in winter temperature. (In case you don’t know, the weather reflects short-term conditions of the atmosphere and can change constantly, while climate is the average of weather over time and space. ) But as a firm supporter of science, I still believe that the effects of human-induced climate change are detrimental to our planet.
Arguably, there are some pretty convincing arguments from the deniers of global warming that are hard to be rebutted. Yet again, I would like to highlight some strong evidence that proves why global warming is occurring.
The cause of Carbon Emissions
This is quite straight forward to understand. Almost everything produces carbon emissions, but the outcomes can vary. Carbon emissions can be beneficial when the use of energy allows the atmosphere and ecosystem to remain perfectly balanced. However, many natural phenomena such as volcano eruptions and human behaviors such as industrial productions can contribute to carbon emission.
The harms of carbon emission
So why on earth should we even care about carbon emissions? Well, the answer is quite simple, because it harms people’s life on earth! Some of the consequences of carbon emissions include shrinking water supplies and irreversible changes that harm the geologic environment. Moreover, it only requires a small temperature change to create enormous effects on the environment. According to NASA temperatures at the end of the last ice age were only 2.5 to 5 degrees Celsius (5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than the current temperature, but parts of the United States were covered with thousands of feet of ice. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimated that carbon emissions will cause global temperatures to rise by approximately 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) within the next 100 years. It is important to note that these are only some of the numerous problems caused by carbon emission excluding global warming.
The content I have covered only touched on the basic understanding of how global warming can affect our world. In other words, there are many more problems worth discussing in the future, and I would encourage you all to explore and research on your own.
