When looking into the sky on a bright, clear summer day what one usually views is a brilliant, blue sky that appears to stretch endlessly. As the sun, the enormous star seen each day, shines down upon the earth, it releases heat from over 93 million miles away--equivalent to over 1.3 trillion NFL football fields. The sun, in all of its splendor, is what keeps life active on this planet and without it life would surely cease to exist. However, the last thing on the long list of threats to our planet today is the absence of the sun. A major concern in the global society today is a term deemed "global warming." This warming of the planet cannot be seen nor readily felt on a daily basis. Looking into the sky, it appears clear, but there is an ominous layer of carbon dioxide gas accumulating in our upper atmosphere that blocks heat from leaving our planet in the effective manner that it is supposed to. This creates an array of problems for environmental sustainability; climatic changes which include an increasing overall global temperature, melting of polar ice caps, sea level increases, drought, along with extinction and impairment of certain species of animals. The challenges faced by these occurrences are not small scale and will greatly affect generations to come if changes are not made to reverse this phenomenon. What many fail to realize is that we are the driving forces behind this and changes can be made to improve the current conditions without any drastic changes in lifestyle habits or cultural customs.
Global warming is primarily due to a high level of CO2 (carbon dioxide gas) being released into our atmosphere and blocking heat from leaving it. To visually represent this, it is easier to picture the world as if it were suspended in a giant bubble--representative of the earth's atmosphere--with the sun located outside of this bubble. Heat from the sun travels through the bubble and reaches the earth. The heat should then dissipate from earth to be...