What Is Global Warming?
Global warming is the long-term heating of Earth’s surface observed since the pre-industrial period (between 1850 and 1900) due to human activities, primarily fossil fuel burning, which increases heat-trapping greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere. This term is not interchangeable with the term “climate change.” In common usage, climate change describes global warming—the ongoing increase in global average temperature—and its effects on Earth’s climate system.
What Are the 5 Main Causes of Global Warming?
- Generating power. Generating electricity and heat by burning fossil fuels causes a large chunk of global emissions.
- Manufacturing goods.
- Cutting down forests.
- Using transportation.
- Producing food.
- Powering buildings.
- Consuming too much.
What Are the Main Effects of Global Warming?
Global warming can result in many serious alterations to the environment, eventually impacting human health. It can also cause a rise in sea level, leading to the loss of coastal land, a change in precipitation patterns, increased risks of droughts and floods, and threats to biodiversity.
Can We Remove Global Warming?
Yes. While we cannot stop global warming overnight, we can slow the rate and limit the amount of global warming by reducing human emissions of heat-trapping gases and soot (“black carbon”).
Why Should Global Warming Be Stopped?
Rising temperatures threaten food security. Increases in pests and diseases and more frequent and intense droughts and floods, reduce the availability of food. Heat-stress causes poor yields, or worse, crop failures.
Is Global Warming Natural?
Scientists have found only one variable to explain the relatively recent rapidity of global warming: an increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity. By burning fossil fuels, humans have increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 45 percent since 1750. A little greenhouse effect is natural.
Is Global Warming Harmful to the Earth?
The planet is warming to a degree beyond what many species can handle, altering or eliminating habitat, reducing food sources, causing drought and other species-harming severe weather events, and even directly killing species that simply can’t stand the heat.
How Does Global Warming Affect Our Daily Lives?
Changes in weather and climate patterns can put lives at risk. Heat is one of the most deadly weather phenomena. As ocean temperatures rise, hurricanes are getting stronger and wetter, which can cause direct and indirect deaths. Dry conditions lead to more wildfires, which bring many health risks.
Who First Discovered Global Warming?
In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming.
Who Named Global Warming?
The term “global warming,” which describes an increase in the Earth’s average temperature surface due to greenhouse gas emissions, is widely believed to have been coined in 1975 by Columbia University geochemist Wallace Broecker, according to NASA.
Featured Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash
