Matt Heiserman Heiserman 1
M. Palz
4/22/10
Research Paper
A Threat To Us All
When people eat junk food, it is bad for their health. Such could be said for the earth and global warming: global warming is like junk food for the earth. So just like humans need to avoid too much junk food to stay healthy, the earth needs to slow down its rate of global warming. Unfortunately, the earth can’t slow down global warming on its own, that’s up to its most dominant inhabitants, human beings. The earth is the home of every single person, regardless of any demographic. So every person, corporation, and government should acknowledge global warming and do whatever they can to help slow down it down.
According to the IPCC, global warming is defined as the increase in the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. The IPCC points out that the increasing amounts of greenhouse gases due to human activity have caused most of the temperature increases since the mid 20th century. The two most prevalent human activities (that release greenhouse gases) are the burning of fossil fuels for energy and deforestation (Graff).
There are currently two primary external forces that cause and fuel global warming. Those are greenhouse gas emissions and solar variation. They each play their
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own part and are both equally important in understanding global warming. So it is important to not overlook either of them.
Greenhouse gases are defined as gases in the atmosphere that absorb infrared radiation (from the sun) and keep the radiation locked in the atmosphere (Graff). This means that the more greenhouse gases we emit, the more heat from the suns infrared radiation gets trapped, leading to rising global temperatures. The presence of greenhouse gases isn’t really disputable, the only real question is how much of an effect they’re having on global...