Kolten Anderson

Natural Disasters
07/26/2014
Global Warming
The topic of global warming has been one of controversy for the past century or
so. It was proposed by a gentleman name Svante Arrhenius in 1986, he proposed a
relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. In other
words he believed that the more carbon dioxide that we release into the atmosphere
that the overall temperature of the earth would increase. There have been many people
who say that humans do not have an effect on global warming and that is simply a
natural process of the earth. I believe that the earth is bound to change, to a point,
regardless of human interaction. I believe that we do not have enough data supporting
the hypothesis of global warming and that we as humans cant completely stop emitting
harmful gasses into the atmosphere due to the fact that we rely so much on
technology that emits gas.
The earth has been in a constant change from since when it was very first created to this
very day. It has natural processes that greatly affect the atmosphere that in turn greatly affect
our climates. Some of these natural processes include volcanoes that emit huge amounts of
carbon dioxide and other gasses into the atmosphere. Another example is forest fires, this is a
natural process that also pollutes our atmosphere by making it harder for terrestrial radiation
to escape therefore causing the climate to heat up. Perhaps the earth is doing what it has
always done, it changes! I do believe that humans can contribute to global warming but on a
very small scale by burning fossil fuels. Overall, mother nature is going to do what she wants to
regardless of what we as humans do, the earth is constantly in a state of change, if it wants to
heat and melt icecaps to raise the sea level than that is exactly what it is going to do. It may be
inconvenient for those people who decided to build their homes near sea level but they can do
what humans have always tried to do, adapt to their environments by, in this case, simply
moving and building elsewhere.
There isnt a whole lot of information that humans have recorded, at least that we have
found or have access to, that show the history of the climates of the world. The earths climate
has only been recorded for the last 150 years; supposedly the earth is 4.6 billion years old. How
can we jump to conclusions with such very little data? Sure we have ways of testing ice in ice
caps and studying karsts topography but the only problem with that is it points us toward the
direction that the earth has had many different periods of global warming and many different
periods of global cooling therefore not helping the theory of humans causing global warming. I
dont believe that we as humans will ever be able to come to a mutual opinion on this subject
simply because the data that we have will always leave us hanging therefore making this
mystery unsolvable.
If human activity is the cause of global warming is there really a way that it can be
stopped? We as humans rely on so many inventions that were once luxuries that are now
necessities that release harmful gasses into our atmosphere that it would be next to
impossible to stop using them. One huge example is cars that run on gas, diesel, or natural gas.
I dont think that humans would be able to function without these luxuries because we rely so
much on these inventions to transport food, water and other materials that are necessary to
sustain life. Would we really be willing to give up these luxuries, after all global warming wont
likely affect us but the future generations. Time will only tell what the future will bring, as for
me I will not be worrying about global warming!