Global Warming And Climate Change - 1398 Words

Global warming and climate change have been frequent topics of discussion over the past several years. Although people tend to focus on the politics, it is important to look past the media aspects of it into the cold hard facts of what our Earth is currently experiencing, and what has caused it in the first place. The cause of climate change includes natural causes, but human causes are what is generating such a rapid global temperature change. It’s time that the ways in which humanity affects the Earth’s climate, how scientists record and measure the climate change, and what can be done in everyday life to slow it down and/or stop global warming, are recognized. There are two main human causes of Earth’s global warming and climate†¦show more content†¦But humans have caused the majority of greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, mostly by the constant use of electricity, transportation, industry and agriculture. In 2013, the US Environmental Protecti on Agency, aka EPA, recorded in an article that 6,673 million metric tons of the equivalent to carbon dioxide has been released due to the emission of those specific greenhouse gases (Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Overview). It is widely agreed that the most relevant greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere are: Water Vapor (H2O), Methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N2O), Ozone (O3), and most commonly, Carbon Dioxide (CO2). What needs to be made known is, air spreads worldwide, and globally-speaking there is no place/country with significantly more greenhouse gases than another does (EPA). All humans are subjected to the same amount of global warming, even if one lives in an area that does not release much greenhouse gas in comparison to a country like the United States. In the textbook The Essential Cosmic Perspective, it makes it clear that visible light is either reflected or absorbed by the Earth, any energy absorbed must be sent back into space, and if not, it causes therm al radiation (Bennett et al. 181). So, when humans burn fossil fuels, it essentially is knowingly creating gases that cannot be returned to space and trapping them into Earth’s atmosphere, thus increasing global temperatures. Along with human activity involving fossil