User:Mrosales

How Global Warming Has Affected Our Envairoment?

Have you ever heard about global warming? Global Warming is related to the green house effect which is believed to be the cause  of gradual warming of the surface of the earth. It occurs when the gasses such as methan and corbon dioxide trap the air into the atmosphere which make worse our envaironment and produce days very warm. According to (IPCC) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), The predicted effects of global warming on the environment and for human life are numerous and varied, in fact some recent climate change may already be occurring such as Ice melting and temperature rise which are the most relevant consequences of the goblal warming in our envairoment in the las decade.

First of all, the accelerated ice melting is one of the most serious consequences of global warming. The forth assesment report by (IPCC) shows that, in historic times, glaciers grew during a cool period from about 1550 to 1850 known as the little ice age. Subsequently, until about 1940, glaciers around the world retreated as the climate warmed. The total surface area of glaciers worldwide has decreased by 50% since the end of the 19th century. Currently, glacier retreat rates and mass balance losses have been increasing in the Andes, Alps, Himalayas etc. As a result of this melting, scientists say that, the sea levels are already rising at a rate of 1 to 2 mm each year, the predicted rise by 2050 is between 20 and 50 cm. Consequently, those rising levels are producing more flooding in low areas and in towns near rivers like Bangladesh, Nile Delta London and many other coastal cities. As a consequence of the rising some islands are disappearing too, those islands that could also disappear are those that have suffered terrible damages by storms, hurricanes and flooding. The people are not the only ones who are affected, there are some animals that are at risk like Polar bear, for many years, there were 1,600 to 2,200. But Paul Richards (2007) said that now there are about 965. In a very short span of time, now there is a much smaller population, and this has been attributed to global warming, Richards said that “the polar bear depends on the capture of ringed seal, because this seal has a very heavy lipid layer. The decreasing Arctic ice will vastly diminish the chances of polar bears capturing these seals, because the bears stalk seals using the seal's breathing hole in the ice”. Additionally the Penguin colonies have declined in the past half century. According to WWF Press “warmer winter temperatures and stronger stoms mean that the penguins had to raise their chicks on increasingly thinner sea ice. For many years, sea ice has broken off early and many eggs and chicks have been blown away before they were ready to survive on their own”. In short scientists blame global warming for all these changes that our planet has been suffering especially ice melting, but this is not the only consequence.

Rising temperatures are changing and affecting the way people live. As an illustration, storms and hurricanes are more powerful and destructive. According to Jay Barnes of Pine Knoll Shores, More heat could generate more storms and more intense hurricanes". A new study in the journal Nature found that hurricanes and typhoons have become stronger and longer-lasting over the past 30 years. Therefore cities are devastated for example, hurricane Katrina left serious economic impacts, businesses were damaged, transportation infrastructure destroyed, and tourism registered lost. However this is not the end, when those catastrophes occur people have to migrate to other places because their house and cities are devastated, migration has affected millions of people in Asia and India. Such migrations may grow dramatically in a near future.

People are dying by the intense heat waves. Scientists, at the University of Oxford in England and the Hadley Centre for Climate Research(20079, recently concluded that human-induced global warming has increased the possibilities by a factor of around six that Europe will see summer heat waves as extreme as that of 2003. That heat wave killed an estimated 20,000 people. In addition the statistics are getting worse. By the middle of this century, every second European summer will be warmer than that of 2003, the scientists say. Heat waves are longer than many years ago. Summer days may look hot now, but scientists predict summer heat waves will get longer and hotter over the coming decades. Summer temperatures will rise for longer periods of time in the later part of the 21st century, according to scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. They base their prediction for dramatic rises in global temperatures and because of the extended heat waves in the United States in 1995 and in Europe in 2003. They studied each case, Chicago heat wave will increase from five to an average of nine days at the end of the century. Also in Paris heat wave days would rise from an average of eleven days last year to seventeen days in the future. We have seen that rising temperatures are changing not only the environment but also the way people live

In conclusion People do not undertand the real problem of global warming may be because they are standing in wrong place but if they could see the damege that has been done to the earth in the last one hundred years things could be different because this is not about what I thing or you thing is about what we all see every day. If people do not take action to the climate changes, the consequences will be even worse, the ice melting and the rising temperatures can be stopped only by us, rememer that we have only one planet.

UNIVERSITY OF CARABOBO

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

MODERN LANGUAGE DEPARTMENT

READING AND TEXT PRODUCTION

Merhil Rosales(2008)

References

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2007) Effects of global warming. Retrieved on january 2008 from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming

Richards, P(2007) Canadian Polar Bears Fighting for Survival. Retrieved on january 2008. From http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2007/12/14/polar-bears-warming.html

(N.A).WWF Press. Penguins in Peril as Climate Warms. Retrieved on january 2008 from http://www.worldwildlife.org/news/displayPR.cfm?prID=474 Jay Barnes. (N/d) Is Global Warming Making Hurricanes Worse? Retrieved on january 2008 form http://www.uncpress.unc.edu/hurr