Evidence Global Warming
admin on July 6th, 2008
There are numerous examples and evidence Global Warming is damaging, however, the most predominant are those which have measured the amount of Arctic melts and extreme weather conditions which are attributed to global warming.
Global warming has increased the earth’s temperature by 1.0 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. The last nine years are among some of the hottest on record in the last twenty-five years. According to NASA 2005 was the hottest year on record.
The results of this is having a marked affect on the amount of ice sheets and glaciers that are declining in size at an alarming rate. The Arctic ice pack has become forty percent thinner over the past four decades. Rising temperatures are also melting glaciers and ice caps. In 2000 the Ward Hunt Ice shelf, the Arctic’s largest single block of ice, began cracking and by 2002 had split all the way through, it is continuing to break into pieces.
Other evidence of global warming has been recorded, since 1979 there has been a sixteen percent increase in some of the areas of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which has experienced some degree of melting. There has also been a fifteen to twenty percent decline in summer sea-ice over the last thirty years.
NASA satellite imagery has shown a reduction in sea-ice covering of some nine percent since 1979 and it believed that if this rate of decline continues there will be no ice in the Arctic by the end of the century.
A MIT study shown that there has been a one hundred percent increase in the ferocity and duration of tropical storms and hurricanes since the 1970s, which is believed to be due to the increased amounts of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, this in turn has increased the earth’s surface temperature.
Evidence of Global Warming also shows that between the years 1800 and 2000 the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen by thirty one percent, rising from two hundred and eighty parts per million to three hundred and sixty seven parts per million. Scientists believe that by 2100 carbon dioxide levels could be as high as nine hundred and seventy part per million.
