This document summarizes several common myths and misconceptions about global warming and refutes them with scientific facts. It explains that while water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, CO2 levels are determined by human activities like burning fossil fuels. While some effects of warming may seem beneficial, the overall impacts of climate change will be severely damaging. Past climate changes were natural, but current warming is human-caused. And unlike weather, climate projections decades in the future can be reliable because models have been validated against past climate data. The document concludes that urgent action is needed to avoid catastrophic effects of global warming.
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Global warming: Fact or Fiction
1. GLOBAL WARMING : FACT & FICTION
PRESENTED BY : NIKUNJ DOBARIYA
ROLL NO. : 04
2. What is Global Warming?
➢Global warming refers to an obvious and
continuing rise in the average temperature of
Earth's climate system due to effect of
greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide
emissions from burning fossil fuels, which trap
heat that would otherwise escape from Earth.
3. Global Warming
MYTH: Water vapor is the most important, larger greenhouse
gas. So if we’re going to control a greenhouse gas, why don’t
we control it instead of carbon dioxide (CO2)?
FACT: Although water vapor traps more heat than CO2,
because of the relationships among CO2, water vapor and
climate, to fight global warming nations must focus on
controlling CO2.
Atmospheric levels of CO2 are determined by how much coal,
natural gas and oil we burn and how many trees we cut down,
as well as by natural processes like plant growth.
Atmospheric levels of water vapor, on the other hand, cannot
be directly controlled by people; rather, they are determined
by temperatures.
4. Global Warming
MYTH: Global warming and extra CO2 will actually be
beneficial — they reduce cold-related deaths and encourage
crop growth.
FACT: Any beneficial effects will be far outweighed by
damage and trouble.
Even a warming in just the middle range of scientific
projections would have shocking impacts on many sectors of
the economy. Rising seas would flood coastal communities,
contaminate water supplies with salt and increase.
.
5. Global Warming
MYTH: Global warming is just part of a natural cycle. The
Arctic(ocean and polar region or northernmost part of the
Earth) has warmed up in the past.
FACT: The global warming we are experiencing is not natural.
People are causing it.
People are causing global warming by burning fossil fuels
(like oil, coal and natural gas) and cutting down forests.
Scientists have shown that these activities are pumping far
more CO2 into the atmosphere than was ever released in
hundreds of thousands of years. This buildup of CO2 is the
biggest cause of global warming.
6. Global Warming
MYTH: We can adapt to climate change — civilization has
survived droughts and temperature shifts before.
FACT: Although humans as a whole have survived the
vagaries of drought, stretches of warmth and cold and more,
entire societies have crashed down from dramatic climatic
shifts.
The current warming of our climate will bring major hardships
and economic dislocations — untold human suffering,
especially for our children and grandchildren. We are already
seeing significant costs from today's global warming which
is caused by greenhouse gas pollution.
Climate has changed in the past and human societies have
survived, but today 7 billion people depend on interconnected
ecosystems and complex technological infrastructure.
7. Global Warming
MYTH: Global warming can’t be happening because some
glaciers and ice sheets are growing, not decreasing.
FACT: In most parts of the world, the retreat of glaciers has
been dramatic. The best available scientific data indicate that
Greenland's massive ice sheet is decreasing.
Between 1961 and 1997, the world’s glaciers lost 890 cubic
miles of ice. The consensus among scientists is that rising air
temperatures are the most important factor behind the retreat
of glaciers on a global scale over long time periods.
Some glaciers in western Norway, Iceland and New Zealand
have been expanding during the past few decades. That
expansion is a result of regional increases in storm frequency
and snowfall rather than colder temperatures — not at all
incompatible with a global warming trend.
8. Global Warming
MYTH: Accurate weather predictions a few days in advance
are hard to come by. Why on earth should we have
confidence in climate projections decades from now?
FACT: Climate prediction is fundamentally different from
weather prediction, just as climate is different from weather.
Today’s climate models can now reproduce the observed
global average climates over the past century and beyond.
Such results have reinforced scientist’s confidence in the
capacity of models to produce reliable projections of future
climate.
9. Global Warming
MYTH: As the ozone hole reduce, global warming will no
longer be a problem.
FACT: Global warming and the ozone hole are two different
problems.
The ozone hole is a thinning of the stratosphere's ozone
layer, which is roughly 9 to 31 miles above the earth's
surface. The depletion of the ozone is due to man-made
chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). A thinner ozone
layer lets more harmful ultraviolet (UV) radiation to reach the
earth's surface.
Global warming, on the other hand, is the increase in the
earth's average temperature due to the buildup of CO2 and
other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human
activities.
10. Global Warming
MYTH: Carbon dioxide is pollutant.
FACT: No reality in this statement. Nitrogen forms 80 percent of the
atmosphere. We can’t live in 100 percent nitrogen either.
Nitrogen is more pollutant than carbon dioxide. It is essential
for plant growth and life on the earth.
MYTH: There is no immediate need to worry over global warming
FACT: Unless and until, some immediate steps are not taken with
respect to this, one can be sure that their children will have to
live in a world much greater suffering than our own.
We risk losing everything if the trend continues. If we
don’t do anything soon, it will be too late to control the shocking
effects of global warming.