Through this book, we realize that climate has the ability to transform and or destroy human societies. The causing of the Medieval Warm Period is still unclear, however, the author is able to draw one clear conclusion from his research in the final chapters of The Great Warming, on the present day propositions of the great climate change over a thousand years ago. “History is always around us, threatening, offering encouragement, sometimes showing us precedents. The warm centuries of a thousand years ago remind us that we have never been masters of the natural world; at our best, we have accommodated ourselves to its fickle realities” (242). I think that The Great Warming was written very clearly and a surprisingly interesting read.…
It's evident that temperature is rising which as a result causes us to experience a lot of abnormal climate changes worldwide. The cause of this increase of temperature is the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is constructed by water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane and ozone. The greenhouse effect is when the gasses trap the sunlight, not making them bounce back to space, which creates the atmosphere to warm, thus making Earth hotter. What’s responsible for realising a large amount of carbon dioxide is the burning of fossils fuels.…
"Consuming Earth's Gifts" (374) 1. William Ruddiman uses first person throughout the essay, do you think it was used effectively? 2. Ruddiman states due to his "Long interest in Earth's climate history, his own concerns tend to focus on a longer term problem". What do mean by a "longer term problem"?…
20,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age, global temperatures were five degrees colder than now (Shaftel). Or for something a little closer to home, sixteen of the last seventeen years have been the hottest years ever recorded, with each new year setting the new record after the last (Shaftel). In 2014, 1300 independent leading ecological scientists convened for the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change at the United Nations. They concluded there was a 95% chance that this increase has been the direct result of human activities such as burning fossil fuels (Intergovernmental Panel). The temperature increase has far deeper consequences than just hotter days, though.…
In general, one might also expect such changes to first be documented in more southerly latitudes such as Hudson Bay although, as noted by Skinner et al. (1998), the eastern side of Hudson Bay and the Labrador sea were cooling between 1950 to 1990 while the western side was…
Today pollution has another meaning compared to how it was defined during the Middle Ages. Currently, pollution is the introduction into the environment of a substance that has harmful effects. Immediately one 's mind jumps to factory smoke or chemicals. However, for most people, a person judged to be simply out of place is not one of those definitions. Pollution was viewed not in its modern sense of bacteria or chemicals, but as in odd sense that confuses and contradicts cherished classifications.…
In 1890 marked what they think started our industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution started unleashing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than would have naturally happen. Scientists have pieced together a record of Earth’s climate, all the way back hundreds of thousands of years or even millions or hundreds of millions of years by analyzing a number of indirect…
The last ice age happened 2 million years ago until 10,000 years ago. At this point, North America is at its normal position, north of the equator. The glacier that covered the Ice Age was the Laurentide Ice Sheet. Before the Ice Age, there was a valley called the Hudson Valley. During the Ice Age a glacier scraped through the rock, which gouged out 240 meters of rock.…
Third, because there has been a significant temperature increase from the past ice age, we know that there has been a significant increase carbon dioxide. For example, when Crowley attempts to identify the correlation between temperature and inter-solar system phenomena, he emphasizes that "There is an unprecedented residual warming in the late 20th century that matches the warming predicted by GHG forcing. The temperature estimates for 2100 also exceed the most comprehensive estimates (50) of global temperature change during the last interglacial ( ~120,000 to 130,000 years ago)--the warmest interval in the past 400,000 years." This quote shows the rapid and severe warming of the Earth’s global temperature.…
James Haley. San Diego: Greenhaven press, 2002 Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web.3 Aug.2015. Global climate changes, including episodes of global cooling and warming, have occurred many times throughout earth’s history as a result of natural variations in solar radiation, atmospheric chemistry, oceanic and atmospheric circulations, volcanic eruptions, and other factors. However, it’s primarily caused by human activities that started during the…
The first major occurrence of climate change was the cooling period that came with photosynthetic organisms (Hardy 24). Due to carbon dioxide and the greenhouse effect, the earth had a relatively high temperature. Photosynthesis started converting carbon dioxide to organic carbon and oxygen, which “reduced the heat trapping capacity of the atmosphere and led to a major cooling trend” (Hardy 24). This was followed by a warming period due to tectonic activity causing volcanic eruptions. More carbon dioxide was released into the environment, which increased the effect of greenhouse gasses and increased the temperature to about 5º warmer than the current temperature.…
1. Introduction Pre-industrial revolution, humans beings used to live a primitive life whereby they used wood for cooking, warming house; as biofuel. Even later when they lived in houses, they used candles to light up their homes. Post-industrial revolution, human beings discovered new energy resources which have made life much easier to live. And the discovery of these resources (coal and oil), have also supported the advancement of new technologies e.g. automobiles, airplanes, generation of electricity from power stations and so on.…
Global warming has been a widely talked about subject for many years. Although it has become such a controversial topic, it is indisputable that there has been a change in the climate in recent history and continues to do so. Over the past one hundred and thirty- five years that data has been collected, copious amounts of climatologists have piloted research and investigations that proves global warming is an ongoing threat to Earth as a result of humans negligence. Furthermore, there is a mounting body of evidence to prove that the cause behind global warming is man-made. Despite the growing evidence, a number of scientists still believe the current changes in the climate a part of a natural global cycle.…
Considering that earth’s temperature was influenced by carbon dioxide, Arrehenius and scientist Thomas Chamberlin later focused on carbon dioxide and the use of it with humans. They developed the concept that human activities could affect global warming by their excessive use of carbon dioxide that would soon contribute to a heating in earth’s temperature. Even though it was years ago when they first discovered that human activities are a large factor in contributing to global warming, many recent studies have shown and proven that this concept is true and the temperatures are increasing like never before. According to (“How is Today’s...” ,n.d), “the global temperature rose a total of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius over about 5,000 years. In the…
Climate change doesn’t always mean “hotter” it can also mean “cooler”. Natural events can cause climate change. Volcanic eruptions release enormous amounts of sulfur dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere in the form of tiny droplets of aerosol. The droplets of aerosol stay in the atmosphere and reflect the sunlight back into space, cooling the earth down. Even the natural gases that are produced are being produced at a much higher rate than previously.…