GLOBAL WARMING

Is global warming due to human actions?



Is global warming due to human actions?

Introduction

The phrase global warming refers to a phenomenon in which the Earth's surface temperature increases from its long-term averages because of an atmospheric blanket of greenhouse gases (GHGs; primarily carbon dioxide, methane, and chlorofluorocarbons) that serve to trap reradiated solar energy from escaping into space. This blanket of greenhouse gases is responsible for providing Earth a temperate, stable, and life- sustaining climate. In common parlance, global warming is often used interchangeably with climate change. In the present context, though it is used in a more restricted sense as a driver of global climate change. The question that arises is global warming due to human actions?

Discussion

The signal of global warming caused by human activity has been sought and found an increase in average temperature on Earth's surface, which has risen 0.6 degrees in the XXI century. In its time, the Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1903, was among the first to point out that coal consumption by men was increasing carbon dioxide the atmosphere, which could cause a global temperature rise. However, Arrhenius thought it might be beneficial to deliver a warming of future glacial periods (Ledley, 2010).

A phenomenon of concern to the world: global warming and its direct effect, climate change, which occupies much of the efforts of the international scientific community to study and control because, they say, threaten the future of humanity. Without a doubt, and endorsed by 3,000 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the UN and the World Meteorological Organization, industrial technologies are the main cause of current global warming. These scientists concluded that human activity is responsible for global warming due to the atmospheric build-up of greenhouse gases, mainly from the consumption of petroleum fuels, agriculture, excessive and improper use of soil (Solomon, 2009).

Although the geophysical and atmospheric drivers of global warming have been known for many years, and the consequences suspected, they were thought to be long term in nature—on the order of thousands of years. However, in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1987 and 1988, climate scientist James Hansen characterized global warming as a real and present threat to the stability of Earth's climate system. He confidently stated that the Earth 20 years later would be warmer than it had been in the past 100,000 years. Over those 20 ...