Climate Change is a very complex, continuous flow of changes in the Earth that in effect, cause global warming to occur. Only in the recent hundred years has global warming been more effective than ever, creating worldwide changes, and affecting everyone. The Earth gets its heat from the sun’s rays that bounce off the planet, warming up the Earth as they go. Only recently when factories began to emit gases that would make the atmosphere trap more of the sun’s rays, eventually heating up the ocean’s temperatures. According to Al Gore, if the ocean’s temperatures heat up, then the warm water surrounding the polar ice caps, Greenland and Antarctica, would eventually over a short period of time, melt. (An Inconvenient Truth) This, in result, would cause rising sea levels, sinking cities that border the coasts from New York City, NY to Calcutta, India, and causing worldwide damage.
Those gases that the factories released are deadly chemicals called carbon dioxide or CO2. Carbon dioxide is one of the main reasons that the climate is changing so fast. Charts given in Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction help give people the idea of just how much we as a community change the environment with our carbon dioxide emissions. (Mark Masslin) In just two-hundred years we have raised carbon dioxide concentration has increased from about 280 to 360 in our planet’s ice.
It’s not just in the polar ice caps that the heat increase is affecting. Increased weather patterns and unusual weather storms are occurring more and more often. Hurricane’s are becoming more and more deadly because they are created from the warm ocean and hot temperature the water is. Because the water is rising, the stronger the hurricane’s become, one of the worst actually back in 2005 in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina. Going back to the carbon dioxide increases, over the past few years, the temperature of the world has been the hottest on record, indicating that it’s not just some natural phenomenon that Mother Nature is creating but something that our society has created. The hot temperature creates a problem for dry countries. With their always decreasing water supply, the increased heat evaporates whatever is remaining for those countries, causing sever drought and even death.
Most of these problems, though, could have been resolved years ago when Congress was given the option to tax people’s carbon emission. Al Gore called it the Carbon Tax and had tried to pass the tax back in the 1970s but failed get it to go through Congress. (An Inconvenient Truth) If people are taxed for how much carbon and greenhouse gases they use, then people assumed that the companies would stop creating so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are many scientific explanations for why the Earth’s climate changes so much, but the most significant reason has to be our lack of attention to the problem. It’s our fault that the planet’s temperature is heating up and we’re waiting until these past few years to actually try to solve the problem. “The United States alone is responsible for 30.3 percent of global warming.” (An Inconvenient Truth) Al Gore mentions in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. There is not enough time to stop global warming but still enough to slow it down to find a way to fix what has already been done to the planet.
An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Al Gore. Paramount Vantage, 2006.
Masslin, Mark. GW: AVSI. Oxford, EN. OVP, 2004
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