User:Wainscemuc/sandbox

Link to Google Doc with Edits
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wJ-uR7kMj6GM-H9757eVoVxJ8I3bpspSNgZO1y8m-JU/edit?usp=sharing

Human Impact on the Environment

Plan of Action
- Take away information from articles that are way too long, including the article about the meat industry and other sections that include information about things other than specifically what HUMANS are doing to contribute to climate change.

- include more about the coal industry (that isn't already on the link provided about the industry). The entire industry is a human-run activity so there should be much more information about it than what is shown (I will try to find my old research paper about the coal industry which has very good, non-bias and reliable sources and a lot of great information)

- take away information about Palm Oil that is not relevant to human contribution and more about the oil itself.

- Examples are good, such as palm oil and other similar examples, but we need to let the readers know how this is affecting the environment and how it is because of our own doing.

- i think it is important to add the graph by NASA about how our C02 levels have risen so much in recent years (to coordinate how the human population has risen) so ypu can see a correlation between the two and how it is most certainly related to usHuman impact on the environment

This article is missing a lot of information that could educate readers further. It is a very long article but each individual section only has a small amount of information. For example, the section on overpopulation doesn’t talk about population capacity. We can see through examples of other animals like deer being out in the northern region with no predators and how they got so overpopulated that they could no longer feed themselves and eventually all died out. The article about overconsumption was also short. It should talk more about different kinds of overconsumption (not just food, but junk mail?) and how much waste we are creating. In agriculture, its very short. There’s a great section on the meat industry but agriculture in general needs to talk more about gasses produced and how pesticides and growing too much can harm the environment. We need more information about palm oil and the deforestation that comes with it. Coal mining also has such a small amount of information for how hot of a topic its been in recent years.

The history page shows thousands of edits. There are several each week to almost every single category mentioned. I noticed that a lot of edits were to take away ‘vandalism’ where people would say “hi my name is….” Or include their twitter handle just to be funny. This article is frequently updated, but most are smaller and more technical or just adding a sentence or two here and there.

Arctic Ocean and Climate Change Past Research
Effect of Global Warming on the Arctic

Many people think that the warming of the Earth we are currently experiencing is just part of Earth's cycles. Others think that global warming is a good thing because it will open up the Arctic region to more accessible fishing. However, the rate at which the Earth is currently warming is far more rapid than past cycles and is undoubtedly due to human activities. Roxanne Greitz Miller published an article for the National Science Teacher’s Association and she made the point that the warmest ten years in the past century have been recorded in the past 15 years (Miller). These facts show that Global Warming is real and it’s happening faster now than ever before, which many people don't realize. Many believe the effects of Climate Change will be seen in the distant future, but in this paper, I will explain how we are seeing change presently as well as in the future.

Greenhouse gas emissions, especially CO2, are causing the sea ice in the Arctic to melt at alarming rates. Evidence produced by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) shows that the arctic region is warming at two times the rate of any other region on Earth (Corell). The reason why the speed of warming is so alarming is because arctic wildlife and plants may not be able to adapt in time, which could be devastating to their species. The future of the Arctic if these trends continue is scary and is something that needs to be talked about. I will explain how the warming we are currently experiencing brings more bad than good, even though it may open up more credible fishing areas. In this paper, I will discuss the effects of Global Warming on the Arctic region. We will look at this through first talking about what scientists are predicting what the future of the Arctic will look and how the temperatures will rise, secondly, discussing the food chain, and finally looking at extinction. Carbon dioxide emissions produced by humans are causing arctic ice to melt from the warming result, leading to less area for animals to feed and live and bringing us to a disastrous future for arctic life.

In my first point of my thesis, I mention the predicted future of the arctic if the current trends continue. People know that we need to cut back on our CO2 emission because it is going to melt all of the ice and cause harm to animals. What they don't know is just how drastic this change is going to be. National Geographic published an article by Marianne Lavelle and she explains what will happen. In the next 300 years, she says that global temperatures will rise by 14.4 degrees Fahrenheit. In the Arctic, the temperatures would rise by much more. Temperatures are expected to raise by 30.6 degrees fahrenheit. Lavelle points out that “These conclusions are several degrees warmer than previous studies have projected” (Lavelle).

These temperature changes are a huge deal to the arctic animals. If the ice melts, they will have no place to live and their food supply will be gone. The most frightening fact to me is that it took only a rise of 10.8 degrees fahrenheit to melt the ice and get us out of the famously-known Ice Age. This was pointed out by Myles Allen who is the head of a climate dynamics group studying at Oxford (Lavelle). If the Arctic follows the predicted trends, it will cause the temperatures around the globe to rise as high as they once were during the Eocene era 52 to 56 million years ago. This is when the earth was so warm that “palm trees grew as far north as Alaska and crocodiles swam in the Arctic” (Lavelle).

Some critics say that animals were able to survive that change, so they’ll survive this, too. However, animals during the Eocene period had millions of years to adapt. Currently, we are given a time frame of two hundred to three hundred years. Scott Wing, the Smithsonian Institution's curator of fossil plants, says that in the grand time frame of the world, this is but an instant and they won't be able to adapt in time (Lavelle).

Matthew Huber of the IPPC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) disagrees that the Arctic temperatures will rise as much as 30 degrees. Huber is an Earth scientist at the University of New Hampshire and Perdue and according to his predictions, the temperatures would have to rise by another eighteen degrees before there could be tropical conditions in this region. However, he does agree that the temperature changes in the given period of time (two hundred to three hundred years) will be great enough to induce deadly heat waves (Lavelle).

Another scientist that weighs in on the future conditions is David King. King had an article in the Journal of Applied Ecology published by the British Ecological Society and he is the Chief Scientific Advisor and Head of the Office of Science and Technology in London. He talks about the changes already occurring, which should be terrifying to people. King states that between 1970-2000, there has already been a loss of 30% of our biodiversity (King). We must realize that this is only going to get worse as the earth continues to heat.

Scientist Roxanne Greitz Miller, published in the National Science Teacher’s Association, has done research that shows that Earth has warmed by one degree Fahrenheit in the past 100 years. While 1 degree certainly doesn't seem like much to you and me, we can see just how delicate our planet is from the changes that have happened within these 100 years. For example, we have seen the amount of glacial melting by looking at the rising sea levels; over the time period, the oceans have risen between four and eight inches. (Miller). We have also lost thirty percent of our biodiversity in between 1970 and 2000 as stated in the previous paragraph (King).

King also points out that the oceans are absorbing the carbon dioxide being produced (King). This is raising the pH of the ocean, making it more acidic. If this continues, the oceans will become uninhabitable for marine life, bringing us back to the prediction a depleted food supply for the Arctic mammals. The animals in the arctic will not be able to feed on fish or plankton because they will have all gone extinct due to the high pH levels in the ocean.

Robert W. Corell wrote an article called Ambio published by Springer on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Corell is a research fellow at the Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society and at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Through his expertise, he says that the warming of the arctic will not only affect Arctic animals; it will affect species from all over. This is because “migratory species depend on breeding and feeding grounds in the Arctic” (Corell). He also points out that the melting of sea ice will lead to flooding in coastal regions which will affect people and animals along these coastlines (Corell).

The second reason why global warming is so alarming is because it is causing an imbalance in the food chain. One example of this is that plants will be fruitful earlier in the year due to a shorter winter and longer growing season. As we know, birds from the arctic region migrate south for the winter months. Once the winter is over, they fly back north for the fruiting season to find a mate and reproduce. If the winter in the Arctic is getting shorter and shorter, the natural internal clock of the birds will be thrown off. They will return to the Arctic too late in the spring season. A group of scientists in the professional fields of Biology and Ecology (Dominique Berteaux, Denis Reale, Andrew G. McAdam, and Stan Boutin) are saying that this could be devastating to the new generations of Arctic birds.

The timing of migration is so important because the birds need the fruit produced by the trees to feed themselves and their young. If they are arriving back to the Arctic too late and miss the peak fruit season, they may not have enough food to feed their young and themselves. The article written by Dominique Berteaux, Denis Reale, Andrew G. McAdam, and Stan Boutin focuses a lot on the idea of natural selection and phenology. Berteaux and Reale work at the University of Quebec in Montreal. Berteaux is with the Canada Research Chair in Conservation of Northern Ecosystems. Reale is with the Canada Research Chair in Behavioral Ecology. McAdam and Boutin birth work for the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. They suggest that, with the timing of the seasons and the birds’ migration patterns being out of sync, natural selection may take the lives of too many birds than can be replaced quickly enough. Species may die out due to the shortening of winters and spring coming earlier than usual (Berteaux, Reale, McAdam, and Boutin).

Another reason why warming in the Arctic will cause an imbalance in the food chain is because the melting of sea ice will result in less land mass for animals who are ice-dependent. Sue E. Moore and Henry P. Huntington wrote an article called “Arctic Marine Mammals and Climate Change: Impacts and Resilience” published by Ecological Applications in behalf of Wiley. Moore studies with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center ℅ Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington. Huntington has a Ph.D. In Polar Studies on the Arctic Conservation Science Team. In this article, they describe the effects that less sea ice would have on mammals. “Polar bears, walrus and seals rely on sea ice for hunting, breeding, and resting” (Moore and Huntington). If the ice melts, the living environments for these mammals would be taken away and they would have no place to go to hunt or make their homes. They would be forced together on the land that is left, causing overpopulation and too much crowding. If these animals are too close together, the struggle for food will only become worse. They will have a harder time trying to find open grounds for hunting.

Moore and Huntington said, “In all cases, decreases in sea ice will provide less stable hunting platforms” (Moore and Huntington). Less land mass leads to less area to find food, causing the land to become overpopulated and thus deprecating the food supply. We can see through these examples that global warming will cause imbalances in the food chain, which could be devastating to many arctic species.

Next, in the final point of my thesis, I will discuss the relationship between the food chain and the animals that could go extinct because of the warming of the arctic region and sea ice melting. However, while some species go extinct, others may flourish for a time. Brian Clark Howard, journalist at National Geographic and graduate from Columbia University, worked with Marine Ecologist Enric Sala to write an article based on the studies by Sala on a species of birds called Little Auks. These birds are known as an “indicator species” because they are especially vulnerable to climate change and raise red flags for what is about to happen to more species in the arctic (Howard and Sala). They live on an island called Franz-Josef Land off the northern end of the Russian coast. Their research shows that these birds are adapting well to the melting of sea ice. They eat the zooplankton that live around sea ice, but since it is melting, the zooplankton are in shock. The population of these birds is higher than it has been in the past few decades, but their average body mass has decreased by 4%. Scientists don’t know if this will have a devastating effect on the species because they don’t know exactly how much body mass a Little Auk can lose before it dies (Howard and Sala). This change in the Little Auk population is important for people to see because the change is approaching more quickly than people realize. Many think that global warming won't affect anything until far down the road, but this is an example of a species that is currently experiencing the effects.

Moore and Huntington, authors of “Arctic Marine Mammals and Climate Change: Impacts and Resilience”, talk about the relationship between polar bears, walrus, and seals and global warming. These animals need large masses of ice in order to live, breed, and eat. If the ice melts, these mammals will not have enough room to survive. As stated in the first point of this essay, these animals will be forced into small areas and will run out of food due to overpopulation. Moore and Huntington point out that the overall health of these mammals will decline because if they have less food to eat, they will have less blubber to keep them safe in freezing temperatures (Moore and Huntington). This is important because it will be devastating to the species as this problem progresses.

However, some species may benefit from the sea ice melting. For example, whales will benefit because seals will have to spend more time in the water (because they do not have enough land mass to live on). This will benefit the whales because they will have a more accessible food supply, which will allow them to reproduce because the potential is high. Some may read this and think it is great for the whales, but there’s a catch. What people don't realize is that even though there are more seals available for whales to eat, the seal population will decrease. If the seals are being eaten while their own food supply is rapidly decreasing due to overpopulation, their numbers will decrease. This will in turn be devastating to the whales because if the seal population is deprecated, then so will the food supply for the whales that were once flourishing from all the available food. Now the whales will see the same problem that the seals once encountered: overpopulation, decreased food supply, and declining overall health due to starvation.

These points I have made demonstrate that the warming we are currently experience are not just part of the Earth’s cycles. Ronald J. Bee wrote an article called Great Decisions published by the Foreign Policy Association points out that Carbon Dioxide concentrations have not been this high for half a million years. He took parts per million (ppm) measurements from ice cores to understand how much carbon dioxide levels have been rising. Bee also says that humans produce about twenty-four billion tons of fossil fuel emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere each year. Only about half of this is being absorbed by plants (Bee). The warming is affecting Arctic life by reducing their land mass and space to hunt, breed, and live. This problem should not be seen as a far-off issue, we know the effects are present now through the example given of the Little Auks and seeing the sea levels rising. Global Warming is causing an imbalance in the food chain and will cause some species to go extinct while others flourish for a time. These changes are important for people to see and for us to know what to expect in the future if these trends continue.

Appalachia
Stereotyping

While there is a tab that addresses stereotyping in this article, I still feel that there is some stereotyping when taking about religion and education. With Religion, I notice it mostly in talking about how their main education was about the bible and that they are significantly behind other states in education. I believe this is an unfair statement because the Appalachian Region is so large, consisting of 13 states including Kentucky, Ohio, and all of West Virginia.

Music

- I feel that there is not enough information about music in the Appalachian Region. Bluegrass was started in Kentucky and widely influenced other types of music coming out of this region. It has become a huge part of Appalachian culture.

-article talks about Eastern Kentuckians moving to Cincinnati with the mechanization of coal mining and I found this interesting because my family moved from Owenton Kentucky to the very northern parts of Kentucky and Cincinnati.

Logging

-does a good job of explaining, all trees in Daniel Boone National Forest and most wooded areas in Kentucky and other states have trees less than 100 years old due to such widespread logging. They cut all trees down for millions of acres until there was nothing and regrowth process was slow.

Coal Mining

-does not mention income of workers specifically which I think is important to include. Also doesn't talk about the Coal Mining Towns that the miners and their families lived in. They had so much coal dust in their water that they could light it on fire. This was a really important part of Appalachian history.

On the talk page, most comments also include the observation of things and information left out of the article.