Argumentative Essay on climate change

Many Americans assume that global warming also known as climate change is nothing to be concerned with while the earth’s average temperature begins to rise. This is something that has always been very important to me from an environmental standpoint since we do not have a planet B. If we all play our part in making the world a more environmentally friendly place we may be able to delay the inevitable, In the meantime climate change is the biggest threat to humanity in the 21st century.

On one hand McCarthy, 2012, says we pollute the air with greenhouse gases from fossil fuels and methane, emitting from the landfills that we stuff with trash that is on average 4.5 pounds a day throughout our life that is a ninety-thousand pound legacy of garbage that we are leaving for our children that for the most part could have easily been recycled. This is eating away at our ozone layer which protects us from the sun that at its core burns twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit and in return we are seeing melting ice caps which stores carbon dioxide, a gas trapped within them and is being released into our atmosphere, thus causing sea levels to rise at an even greater rate. We are cutting down the trees that naturally take in our waste product so it will not aid in diminishing us as a race and the world as we know it and even supplies us with oxygen in return, but at least we have all the paper we will ever need and a housing market that is flourishing. What the expression “It’s a small world” meant to my generation as kids was everyone knows everyone. We are all connected in some way or another, but what it means for the next generation is we have overpopulated the earth and used up all its natural resources such as water. Only 3% of the water on Earth is freshwater. The rest is saltwater, this is important because fresh drinking water supplies are becoming increasingly scarce with only 20% of the worlds population having running water, the U.S. consumes about 1500 plastic water bottles per-second when a single bottle will take hundreds or even thousands of years to biodegrade. I am guilty of much of this myself. I own an SUV, forget to turn lights off and take long showers even pay good money for bottles of moisture myself. It’s really a standard we set for ourselves as Americans, most of us do it without even asking at whose cost are we exhausting basic elements for human survival, but we are getting the answer. It is our children and grandchildren, our legacy.

On the other hand maybe climate change is not the biggest threat to humanity in the 21st century. If we cannot accurately predict the weather in a week from now how can we in one-hundred years? After all the placement of some weather stations in urban areas may produce inaccurate measurements, such as the ones located in urban heat islands. These areas can show a rise in temperature due to miles of heat absorbing asphalt, large city transportation and the many businesses and homes in these areas producing large amounts of carbon dioxide, but keep in mind this is just some weather stations, not all.

The evidence of climate change is substantial. Hayworth, 2005, says Global sea level rose about seven inches in the last century, global temperature rise is the highest it has ever been with ten of the warmest years happening in the past twelve years. The Oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat showing warming oceans as well as shrinking ice sheets. The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have both decreased in-mass. NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 36 to 60 miles of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 36 miles of ice between 2002 and 2005. Right now we are experiencing decreasing arctic sea ice as well as glacial retreat, almost everywhere around the world from the Alps, and the Himalayas, to the Rockies, Alaska and Africa. Back here at home the number of recorded high temperature events in the U.S has been increasing, while the number of record low temperature events has been decreasing. I thought how much more proof do we need to get us in the right direction until I came across a 2003 research paper that was published in a Science journal that talked about talked about three ice core samples from Antarctica. The ice was around 240,000 years old. The ice showed that carbon dioxide rose between 600 to 1000 years before the temperatures did, and before the Antarctic glaciers began to melt. The authors thinks that carbon dioxide may not be the cause of global warming, but that it contributes to the process.

I agree that rising temperatures release carbon dioxide trapped in glacial ice contributing to global temperature rise, and the paper suggests that the carbon dioxide increases might follow rising temperatures, not the other way around. The ice suggests this is a natural process. This observation is just one of the factors. That is not to say that science places the blame on humanity without enough scientific proof to back it up. More than 1,700 American cities and towns including Boston, New York, and Miami, are at greater risk from rising sea levels than previously feared, a new study has found. By the year 2100, the future of at least part of these 1,700 locations we call home will be underwater due to greenhouse gas emissions built up in the atmosphere. If we cannot put policies in order to protect the earth this is the direction we are heading in and is why climate change is the biggest threat to humanity in the 21st century.