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Global Warming: Contemporary Issues Companion

Decent Essays

In January 200l the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a group of scientific experts assembled by the United Nations, released a frightening report on the potential consequences of the climate phenomenon known as global warming. The panel found that the 1990s had been the warmest decade on record and predicted that temperatures will rise anywhere from 2.5 to 10.4 degrees around the world over the next century, causing changes to global weather patterns. Indeed, unusual and frequently destructive weather had been occurring around the globe: twenty-seven inches of rain in one day in Hilo, Hawaii; an unheard-of thunderstorm in Barrow, Alaska; a huge ice storm in Atlanta, Georgia; massive floods in Europe; and an unprecedented …show more content…

Because of the increased concentrations of greenhouse gases, states Maslin, "planet Earth is warming faster than at any other time in the past 1000 years and there is little doubt that human activity is to blame."
The Debate over Global Warming
Experts disagree about the causes of global warming, its severity, and how best to solve the problem. Kevin A. Shapiro, a neuroscience researcher based at Harvard, while acknowledging that earth's climate has warmed slightly in the last century, argues that this fact "more or less exhausts the scientific consensus. On every other important question--what the major causes of global warming are, what its effects will be, whether we should try to prevent it and, if so, how--there is considerable uncertainty." The use of computer simulations of weather patterns to predict the future extent and impact of global warming is particularly divisive. According to Shapiro, the use of these models has resulted in the accumulation of patchy and unreliable conclusions about human impact on earth's climate. Even the 2001 IPCC report, which was written by 122 lead authors and 515 contributing authors and was reviewed by another 450 scientists, does not represent total agreement among climate experts about the causes and effects of global warming. Meterologist Richard Lindzen, who was one of the 450 scientists who contributed to the report, notes that the

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