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Global Warming Essay

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“Two thousand scientists, in a hundred countries, engaged in the most elaborate, well organized scientific collaboration in the history of humankind, have produced long-since a consensus that we will face a string of terrible catastrophes unless we act to prepare ourselves and deal with the underlying causes of global warming.” (Al Gore). So, what exactly is global warming? Has it happened before? If so, what were the effects? Specifically, how will it affect the human population? Are humans causing it? These are but a few of the questions we need to answer when we study global warming.
Global warming is the escalation in the average temperature of Earth's near-surface air and oceans that has been occurring since the middle of the …show more content…

These changes have taken two primary forms, periods of time when ice covered significant portions of the Earth – called glacial periods, also known as “ice ages” to interglacial periods where the ice was completely melted or pushed back to the to the poles. The earth’s climate is dynamic, always changing. Scientist’s know this because they have been able to put together a snapshot of the earth’s climate going back anywhere from decades to several epochs ago. Scientists have been able to do this by evaluating surrogate, also known as proxy, measures of climate – such as ice cores, boreholes, tree rings, glacier lengths, pollen remains, and ocean sediments, along with studying how the earth orbits around the sun. In the past, the climate change has been pushed primarily by nature itself, things such as: changes in the earth's orbit, changes in the sun's intensity, and volcanic eruptions. Even the temperature itself has an effect on the climate, when the global temperature becomes warmer carbon dioxide is emitted from the oceans, causing the greenhouse gases to increase the overall temperature even more, conversely when the global temperatures become cooler, carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean and contributes additional cooling. The last couple of millennia have been relatively stable in so far as the climate goes; with only three departures from

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