Global Warming

The phrase "Going Green" has become a common term over the last couple years. People from all walks of life are becoming involved in helping the environnment. We see celeberties on television promoting recycling and even kids in school planting trees as a class project or experiments. Protecting the envioroment has become the main priority of many thanks to a little thing called Global Warming. Global Warming is an increase in the earth's atmospheric and oceanic temperatures widely predicted to occur due to an increase in the greenhouse effect resulting especially from pollution. Scientists have spent decades trying to figure out what is causing global warming. Scientists know that several greenhouse gases are responsible for global warming, but greenhouse gases arenot all bad. The atmosphere has a natural supply of greenhouse gases. They capture heat and keep the surface of the Earth warm enough for us to live on. Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be an uninhabitable, frozen wasteland. But to much of the greenhouse effect can be bad. Industries took off in the mid-1700s, and people started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases. Fossil fuels were burned more and more to run our cars, trucks, factories, planes and power plants, adding to the natural supply of greenhouse gases. The gases, which can stay in the atmosphere for at least fifty years and up to centuries, are building up beyond the Earth's capacity to remove them and, in effect, creating an extra-thick heat blanket around the Earth.



Now, I think global warming is a very serious issue. People really need to recycle and reuse things and just cut down on pollution. Whether it's throwing away your garbage or switching to a more efficient or "green" car. As a result from these greenhouse gases is that the globe has heated up by about one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, and it has heated up more intensely over the past two decades.
Now you may not think that one degree sounds like alot but if you consider the fact that the difference in global average temperatures between modern times and the last ice age,was only about 9 degrees Fahrenheit. You would see that one degree makes a big difference, especially since the unnatural warming will continue as long as we keep putting extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

http://www.edf.org/home.cfm
http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/