The Support

According to National Geographic, global warming is a subject that shows no sign of cooling down and Earth is showing many signs of climate change.

The last two decades were the hottest in 400 years, which means the rate of warming is increasing.

The Arctic would be the place that is feeling the effects the most. The average temperature in Alaska, western Canada and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average. The Arctic ice is quickly disappearing and it is predicted that 2040 will be the first completely ice-free summer.

Along with the rapid disappearing of the Arctic, glaciers and mountain snows are going at the same rate. For example, in 1910, Montana’s Glacier National Park had 150 glaciers. It currently has 27 glaciers. The Northern Hemisphere thaws come a week earlier in the spring and freezes begin a week later. Small but prolonged rises in sea temperature force coral colonies to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae, a process known as bleaching. In 1998, coral reefs suffered the worst bleaching, with some areas seeing a 70 percent increase.

So the question is, are humans causing it?

“Very likely,” said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a 2007 February report.

The report was based on 2,500 scientists in more than 130 different countries and concluded that humans have caused most of not all of the current warming, called anthropogenic climate change when human-caused.

Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth’s surface. Humans are creating the release of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere faster than plants and oceans can obsorb it. The gases maintain in the atmosphere for years, so if all the emissions were eliminated today global warming would not immediately stop.

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