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Essay about Humans Must Adapt to Global Warming

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No one in the scientific community would argue with the premise that the earth’s climate has changed over the eons of its existence or that it will continue to change. The arguments now revolve around if mankind’s use of the environment has specifically altered our climate.

Scientists have described our world as a clump of matter that spun out of the sun to join its journey hurling though cold and empty space. Our spaceship earth would match the moon and have no climate had not molten core continued to pierce its cold crust, spewing forth chemicals that would eventually form our atmosphere, our seas and life itself (“Mcphee”).

The geological record shows a tumultuous earth, but because the events occur slowly over millions of …show more content…

In an online edition of the Journal Science, one team suggests that glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea are melting twice as fast near the coast than they has ten years age. These glaciers help drain the West Antarctic Sea, and area that consists of enough ice to raise the sea level twenty or so feet (“Revkin”). As the receding glaciers and polar ice caps part of the natural gerological process, or is the human’s comsumption of fossil fuels to blame? Do we as humans face a dilemma of rising seas of our own making or is the earth following it own path and we can only be observers of events that our beyond our control? The earths history is recorded in rocks, tree ring, ice cores, and mud. We must assume that the climates were warmer or colder based on the type of fossiled fauna left in the geological record. No actual evidence is left in rock formations that shows the chemical make up of historic atmospheres. Scientists have recently by passed this dilemma by coring glaciers, allowing them to look into past atmospheres as old as 750,000 years.

Glaciers are made by compaction of snow on land. As the snow compacts and gets deeper it “is subject to alteration and movement owing to its own weight and pressure” (Curry 292). Snow deposits transform into a glaciers at an average depth of about 10 meters. The deeper the firn snow us the stronger the bonds between snow flakes become through a process called sublimation, thus

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