Global Warming Effects

Global Warming Causes

This article will reveal to the global warming causes. As defined in wikipedia.org, global warming is a term that "refers to the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation." The average air temperature near the Earth's surface has increased with almost 1°C during the last century, and this effect is mostly due to the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

But what causes global warming? Everything is related to the global cycle of carbon. Carbon is unquestionably one of the most important elements on Earth. It is the principal building block for the organic compounds that make up life. Carbon's electron structure gives it a plus 4 charge, which means that it can readily form bonds with itself, leading to a great diversity in the chemical compounds that can be formed around carbon; hence the diversity and complexity of life. Carbon occurs in many other forms and places on Earth; it is a major constituent of limestones, occurring as calcium carbonate; it is dissolved in ocean water and fresh water; and it is present in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, the second most important greenhouse gas.

The flow of carbon throughout the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere is one of the most complex, interesting, and important of the global cycles. More than any other global cycle, the carbon cycle challenges us to draw together information from biology, chemistry, oceanography, and geology in order to understand how it works and what causes it to change.

The potential effects of human activities on the carbon cycle, and the implications for climate change were first noticed and studied by the Swedish chemist, S. Arrhenius, in 1896. He realized that CO2 in the atmosphere was an important greenhouse gas and that it was a by-product of burning fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil). He even calculated that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would lead to a temperature rise of 4-5°C - amazingly close to the current estimates obtained with global, 3-D climate models that run on supercomputers. This early recognition of human perturbations to the carbon cycle and the climatic implications did not raise many eyebrows at the time, but the experiment was just beginning then.

We currently have an unusually high concentration of carbon dioxide. The climatological effects are thus potentially significant. To find atmospheric CO2 levels equivalent to the present, we have to go back millions of years. The high concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, traps the sun rays and makes them stay in our atmosphere instead of dissipating into space as they should. This causes the temperature increase, which is what we call global warming.