What basically is Global warming and what are its miseffects?

Question

I actually want to know the origin of global warming. How it can affect the living organism like humans , trees , animals , insects etc.

Answer 1

global warming is over, and animals starve to death in snow not able to find food

Answer 2

The adverse effects of deforestation:

(i) Immediate effects of deforestation include the washing away of soil in the monsoon season. This is because trees are no longer anchoring and binding the soil and so mud slides take place. The earth is leached of minerals by the large amounts of water. The lack of vegetation also means that there will be very few animals in the area. The lack of decomposing vegetation and animals means that the nutrients are not replaced and the area quickly becomes infertile.

(ii) Rivers often silt up as soil is moved downriver and deposition takes place. Fish and plants relying on clear water die as the river becomes more and more clogged. This has a knock-on effect through the entire food chain.

(iii) If large areas of rainforest are cleared, the pattern of precipitation may change. This is because less evapotranspiration (evapotranspiration is a term used to describe the sum of evaporation and plant transpiration from the earth's land surface to atmosphere. Evaporation accounts for the movement of water to the air from sources such as the soil, canopy interception, and water bodies) takes place due to the lack of trees. Water is also not delayed before making its way through the ground because of the lack of trees, shrubs, and leaf litter.

(iv) Another very worrying effect of deforestation is global warming (please refer ‘description on global warming’ in the box below). The Earth is made habitable by a process called the greenhouse effect. Gases, mainly carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and water vapor (H2O), are found in the atmosphere. The effects of global warming are already showing themselves; the polar ice caps are melting and if this continues we are set for a significant rise in sea level, flooding many places.

C. How to help in mitigating the global warming:

(i) We should turn off the light when we do not require, and to use more energy-efficient bulbs. While energy-efficient bulbs are expensive, they do last longer. Not only will this save money, but it reduces the amount of electricity that needs to be generated and so less fossil fuels have to be burned.

(ii) Use public transport, walk, or cycle if possible. It is said that the bicycle is the most efficient form of transport known to man. Only travel in a car when necessary or share with some body to save petrol. This reduces CO2 emissions.

(iii) Try to buy paper or wood products that are certified by the Forestry Commission as being from sustainable, managed woodlands. Using recycled paper and its promotion help in reduction of destruction of forest.

(iv) Avoid excess printing of documents from the computer. Print non-presentation documents on the draft ink setting. If possible print on both sides of sheets of paper, thus saving both paper and money.

(v) Recycle as much as possible. This is not just limited to paper, but can include glass, plastic, metal, and a number of other things. Many councils run recycling collection services.

(vi) Encourage people you know to do any or all of the things above.

Description on Greenhouse Effect:

Consider a glasshouse in the open air - greenhouse works because of the glass panels that line the roof and walls. The glass is transparent to the visible light from the sun, so sunlight can shine in and warm things inside the greenhouse. Now a body at about 35°C emits mostly infrared radiation. (On the other hand our sun, with a surface temperature of about 5500°C, emits mostly visible light.) The glass panels are opaque to infrared light. The result is that the glass lets the energy of the sun in, but won't let it back out. This keeps the inside of a greenhouse warm.

Replace the greenhouse with Earth and glass panels with atmosphere in the above example, and that is how the Earth's greenhouse effect works.

Now to show why the greenhouse effect is a very good thing here are examples from our solar system.

(i) Mercury: Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, so you would expect it to be hot. It is, but only on the day side. During a Mercurian day temperatures reach 464°C, but because there is no atmosphere to cause a greenhouse effect, temperatures drop to -183°C at night. That's cold enough to warrant an investment in triple-paned windows.

(ii) Earth: Our greenhouse effect keeps our night side almost as warm as our day side, allowing life to flourish and keeping the world's collective heating bill manageable.

(iii) Venus: Venus is an example of having a greenhouse that is too good at trapping in the heat.

Even though Venus is twice as far away from the Sun as Mercury, Venus is the planet with the hottest surface temperature day or night. At about 484°C, lead melts on the surface at any time of the day.

The reason why this doesn't happen to Earth is due to the fact that Venus has a much thicker atmosphere with many different kinds of gases. Earth's atmosphere is full of gases that trap infrared radiation (so-called greenhouse gases), but they only trap certain wavelengths at a certain efficiency. In other words, a lot escapes. Venus's atmosphere is more diverse as well as denser, so it traps more wavelengths of infrared radiation at a greater efficiency, making the surface hellishly hot.

That is where the greenhouse effect gets its bad reputation. We do not have a lot of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere right now, and if more is released into the atmosphere, more of the infrared radiation that it traps will be held in, making the world warmer than it is. This kind of global warming is a bad thing.

For further details on various issues on environment, please refer:

http://www.environmentengineering.blogsp...

Answer 3

Too much oxygen in the atmosphere causes the earth to cool and too much CO2 causes warming.  People can argue all they want but if you do your homework on the subject you will find it alarming.  Just look at the rate trees are being cut down and not replaced (trees produce oxygen). If you are really interested and study the subject, you will find that it is very sobering.

Answer 4

Global warming in layman terms occurs when:

The sun takes it daily trip to the earth to warm it so that everyone is all smiles. As he spreads his rays on the earth the ocean in specific is affected. Basically, there is a form of smoke which is forming around the earth caused by our excess use of fuels, gases, fire, and smoke in general. Back to my story; as the sun spreads its rays on the earth and the ocean the rays are then sent back to the sun so that he can come again another day; HOWEVER, some of these infrared rays are trapped in the smog which is formed around the earth, (in a sense they gang up on the suns rays). Once these rays get trapped in that smog they come back down to earth continuously heating the ocean and ground.

I can give one example of how this effect nature:

The ocean consists of ice burgs which are a home to many animals; in specific, Polar Bears, not to mention Penguins and seals.

The ocean is being over heated the ice burgs are melting causing the Polar Bears to swim more than 60 miles in order to find land or another ice burg.  This is causing the Polar Bear species to become endangered and has only left us with 25,000.

If you want to know more about global warming and its effect, I suggest you rent ‘Inconvenient Truth’ produced by Al Gore from your local video shop. I suggest you watch this video; he defines Global warming in the simplest and easiest format possible in a short excerpt.

Answer 5

Global warming occurs in nature, but as of today, there is no evidence to suggest that we contribute to it.

Its highly dependent upon the evaporation from the oceans and rivers in the form of water vapor. Water vapor makes up 95% of all

green-house gases in our atmosphere.  No one can map the Earth’s evaporation system. The clouds are not fully understood.

The trick of global warming is not to classify it as a one trick Al Gore Pony. His definition is one dimensional where it blames man for increasing the temperature by introducing more CO2 into the environment. This is as LAME as it gets.

Answer 6

Humans and human related activities such as industries expansion, deforestation for grazing and planting, etc have lead to an increased emission of gases such as methane (CH4), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), Nitrous Oxide (N2O). This group of gases is collectively known as greenhouse gases - these are not degraded and consequently accumulate in the atmosphere and act as a blanket to block the outgoing radiation/heat energy coming from the sun and hence trap the heat. As a result, this causes the earth's average temperature to rise. This effect is called global warming or the green house effect. Its major impact with increased earth temperature is melting of icebergs and consequently a rise in sea level which threatens to submerge low lying land mostly the islands e.g. maldives