Global Warming by Dennis
dennis....@gmail.com
Xuhuan Li (Dennis)
English 118
Global Warming
“We suffers hottest July for 140 years, more than ten people have died from heatstroke as temperatures soar to nearly 41C” (China News Shanghai reports). “In February 2012 temperatures in Beijing, up to –7.8 °C and satellite data have confirmed that average snow cover has decreased about 0.3 feet compare to 2011” (Beijing Local). I guess you guys are certainly getting used to reading these kinds of news reports in major newspapers and magazines. You might be like me getting puzzled, is this beautiful planet heating up by us, and human activities? Eventually, the debate really boils down to, “What’s the worst that can happen?”
I bet you guys have watched or heard of the movie, The Day After tomorrow, about the possible extreme effects of global warming. The movie opens with Jack who is a paleoclimatologist in Antarctica with his two assistants. The ice shelf breaks off the rest of the continent while they are drilling for ice core samples. In this case it might be over exaggerated, however, indeed, the polar ice caps are rapidly melting year by year nowadays. NASA scientists say in the 1980's the ice caps were about the size of the lower 48 states. It's lost about half its size since then and they now say we might see an ice-free Arctic in 30 to 50 years, as a result rising ocean levels would force over millions of people to abandon their homes and relocate. Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions have increased by about 8% globally from year to year since 1990, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
About two weeks ago in class, I watched the video An Inconvenient Truth. Gore in this video draws a parallel between human activities and global warming. He argues that an increased amount of man-made environment pollutions impact climate changes. Particularly, it causes the global warming. The main idea of Gore’s documentary is to convey to the population that each person uses the earth’s resources to the full without worrying about emissions or pollutions, which they provide into the atmosphere. Gore stresses that the humans should be responsible for the planet. He emphasizes that each person can choose what things to buy, cars to drive, and the amount of the consumed electricity. Based on EPA data, Over 70% of our electricity comes from burning fossil fuels, mostly coal and natural gas and over 90% of the fuel used for transportation is petroleum based, which includes gasoline and diesel.
In addition, we are able to observe the increased hurricanes, floods, and other weather extremes. The most recent data gathered by the National Hurricane Center showed weather and climate-related disasters worldwide in 2010 left close to 70,000 people dead and $99 billion in damages. It occurs because of melting glaciers, rising of the oceans’ level, and changing in the intensity of the water flow by means of warming. After Kyoto Protocol, emissions growth in China, the world’s largest contributor, was down to 3% from a 10% average over the past decade, according to TIME report. And I can obviously feel in my hometown, Chengdu, Southwest of China, the winter there is getting longer and it is not as warm as it was since local government cut off power plant and chemicals manufacturers located in suburban areas.
In the end, if you don’t want to say the industrial revolution gradually led to drastic climate change, we at least are making earth’s natural cycle come faster than before. It is believed that human activities are the major source of tons of CO2, and it indeed has made our earth warmer in over 200 years. We are tiny in front of nature, maybe we cannot change the result of global warming, yet, we can slow down this warming process.
Randy Singh
It’s a good thing to compare other countries effect of global warming, and many movies have been made on the global warming like you mentioned “The Day After Tomorrow” but do you believe this would happen in our time. There is a report from IPCC for 2013; this report has confirmed that humans are also a cause in warming up the planet. That is because we have accelerated the natural cycle, so humanity does need to take action to turn the event of destroying the planet around. We need to invest in clean energy and change our way of living.