Discussion Board: Respond to the following individual with a word count of at le
ID: 284889 • Letter: D
Question
Discussion Board:
Respond to the following individual with a word count of at least 110.
revor 7:22pm Over the course of the past few million years the earth has gone through several periods of cooling and heating up but in recent centuries the earth has begun to heat up at an alarming rate. Many climate change deniers like to cite the fact that the earth has gone through periods of global cooling and warming so to say that this phenomena is natural and nothing to be concerned about. It is not the fact that the planet is heating up that is cause for concern, it is the rate by which it is occurring which concerns scientists. Scientists know how much carbon dioxide was in the air hundreds of thousands of years ago because they actually have small samples of ancient air stored in glacial ice (scholarsandrogues.com Human action is the cause of climate change and is why the atmosphere now is hotter than it was thousands and millions of years ago. Increasing manufacturing over the past centuries have put more carbon dioxide into the air which produced green house gases. Green house gases don't allow the radiation from the sun to escape the atmosphere. When normally a lot of the suns rays are reflected back but because of green house gases these rays cannot escape and heat up the earth.Explanation / Answer
Of course, the rate at which the global average temperature is rising is the real matter of concern. The past major cooling and heating up events were before the Holocene. Holocene is the epoch that started 11600 years ago and essentially all the inception of human civilization have been in this epoch. Therefore to continue our civilization in the way we have built it thus far, we need to stay in this comfortable climate condition. However, we are already reaching the 1oC rise globally and the need of the hour is a robust adaptation and mitigation. In addition, to trapping of solar radiation, the temperature rise is amplified because of the feedback process in the earth system. The feedbacks are when the temperature rises the water vapor rises causing more and more warming. There are many of these feedbacks that amplify global warming.