The Potential Relationship Between Human Activity and Climate Change
The Potential Relationship Between Human Activity and Climate Change The idea of global warming has been around for over one hundred years, but in recent decades climate change has become a serious threat to national security. To better understand, global warming is defined as the gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth's atmosphere, generally recognized as the greenhouse effect, and is caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, CFCs, and other pollutants, also known as greenhouse gases. Researchers have debated for years about the main causes of global warming. Although history can show that global warming is inevitable, the majority of evidence points to human industry and agriculture as a primary cause for this irrational change in the earth’s climate. Today, climate change has become a main concern universally and has quickly led to substantial changes in the world’s physical environment. Extreme weather events are becoming more common and countries all over the world are beginning to experience more and more unnatural disasters every day. Every year that our climate changes and continues to get warmer, studies are beginning to present more evidence that there is a clear cause-and-effect relationship between human activity and climate change. The greenhouse effect was adopted by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius. Considering that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere and that this carbon dioxide is released by burning coal and fuel, Arrhenius “speculated that continued burning of coal and oil would increase concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, making the planet warmer” (“How We Know Human Activity Causes Global Warming” 2). There are things that we humans do daily that may not seem harmful, but evidently these actions are leading factors in the cause of global warming. Automobiles, electricity, heat, and air-conditioning are some of the things people use every day that affect the environment. The rises in
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