Climate Change: Global Warming

We realize that the earth is getting older; however, human activities are also one of the important accounts that are worsening the condition. Human modern lifestyles are subsequently adding greenhouse gases, especially the three major one, to the atmosphere, which made the world warmer than it normally should. This unnatural additional warming is called the "enhanced" greenhouse effect which further called as global warming.

In addition to global warming, the researches show that human activities since the industrial revolution have increased the atmospheric concentration of various greenhouse gases, leading to increased radiative forcing from CO2, methane, tropospheric ozone, CFCs and nitrous oxide. The atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and methane have increased by 36% and 148% respectively since the mid-1700s. These levels are considerably higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. Less direct geological evidence indicates that CO2 values this high were last seen approximately 20 million years ago. Fossil fuel burning has produced approximately three-quarters of the increase in CO2 from human activity over the past 20 years. Most of the rest is due to land-use change, in particular deforestation.

Furthermore, CO2 concentrations are expected to rise continually due to ongoing burning of fossil fuels and land-use change. The rate of rise will depend on uncertain economic, sociological, technological, and natural developments. The IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios gives a wide range of future CO2 scenarios, ranging from 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100. Fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to reach this level and continue emissions past 2100 if coal, tar sands or methane clathrates are extensively exploited.

In brief, the major contributors to global warming are fossil fuels (such as coal and oil) since they release carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, when it’s burned. Further, there are also other main contributors to possible climate change; they are:

1. deforestation: where the trees are released carbon dioxide when the wood is burned.
2. rice paddies, cattle, coal mines, gas pipelines, and landfills produce methane, another greenhouse gas, which today causes about 30% as much warming as carbon dioxide.
   
3. fertilizers and other chemicals release nitrous oxide, which today causes about 10% as much warming as carbon dioxide. (http://www.gcrio.org/gwcc/part1.html).

Those contributors, undeniable, have enhanced the concentration of the three major greenhouse gases particularly CO2 to absorb the sun’s heat excessively since air pollution because of activities of industry, transportation, the increase of vehicles’ volume (which then worsen with traffic jams), and forest fire have contributed large amount of CO2concentration to the air.

On the other hand, methane, another major gas, which created by microbial activities in swamps, scrapheap, septic tank, and also industrial processes, has also increased the heat excessively since methane absorbs the heat around 20 times more than CO2 does. Furthermore, nitrous dioxide (N2O) that naturally produced by bacteria, livestock waste, vehicles’ smoke, and plastic industry processes has contributed 300 times more heat than CO2. SO2 (dioxide sulfur), from industrial and vehicles’ smoke and CFC (chlorofluorocarbon) from the use of AC, refrigerator and aerosol, has also gradually decreased the ozone layer, so that the infrared can’t be filtered maximally.