Global Warming
1. TITLE. Global Warming: Environmental Damage or Natural Cycle
2. PURPOSE. The objective of this paper is to examine the history, indicators, causes and future concerns of global warming.
3. HYPOTHESIS. The Earth is experiencing more man-made pollution than at anytime in our recent past in spite of efforts to reduce emissions and the use of numerous chemicals. Additionally, we are experiencing numerous climatic changes from increased rainfall, temperature, hurricanes and melting of the polar ice fields to name but a few. Global warming is attributed to these climatic changes as a result of emissions from the use of fossil fuels and chemicals.
4. BACKGROUND. Starting with research in the late 1950s, scientists have recorded increased global temperatures and climatic conditions. Over the last twenty years, these climatic changes have been blamed on the build-up of pollution in the atmosphere or as it has come to be called- global warming. Global warming is attributed to the buildup of emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other lesser gases. These gases prevent heat from escaping the Earth¡¦s atmosphere creating the ¡§green house effect.¡¨ Recently, numerous weather changes and catastrophes are ascribed to global warming.
5. DATA.
a. History. The history of the Earth has been almost entirely dominated by ice ages with brief warming periods lasting between 15,000 to 20,000 years. Since the last Ice Age, the Earth has been warming for more than 18,000 years. The Earth did experience a ¡§little ice age¡¨ from about the 1400s to the middle 1800s. This was considered an anomaly. Without global warming we would not be able to inhabit the Earth. From the 1940s to the 1970s, Earth temperatures were declining in many places and many scientists feared, and some predicted, that we were entering another ice age. This was quickly reversed when in...
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