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Informative Essay: Climate Change In The United States

1104 Words5 Pages

Braxton Barnes
24 Feb. 2017
English 2010
Professor Solomon
Climate change
Climate change effects all of us, whether you believe in it. Climate change has been occurring all throughout time, but it has never occurred on such a rapid scale as it is today. Human activity has increased the rate and severity of climate change, to the point of disastrous global implications. Some choose to ignore climate change because of personal bias or for capital gain. Some don’t believe in climate change just based on personal observations, such as the weather hasn’t changed for them, it is still cold, temperature varies naturally, insufficient evidence, “false” news reports, alternate theory, and “God is in control”. (Bertrand) Many don’t see climate change …show more content…

9 of the 10 hottest years ever recorded by NASA occurred in the 2000’s. (“Global”) Global warming, or climate change, is caused when Carbon dioxide, greenhouse gasses and other air pollutants collect in the atmosphere and absorb the solar radiation and sunlight that have already bounced off earth’s surface. This radiation should normally escape into space, but the gasses and pollutants don’t allow it to escape the atmosphere. The pollutants trap the heat causing the planet’s temperature to rise. “In the United States, the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity is the largest source of heat-trapping pollution, producing about two billion tons of CO2 every year. Coal-burning power plants are by far the biggest polluters. The country’s second-largest source of carbon pollution is the transportation sector, which generates about 1.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions a year.” …show more content…

Polar Ice caps have shrunk ice from lakes and rivers is melting earlier, animals have migrated from their usual spots and plants are flowering sooner. Effects from climate change predicted by scientists are now occurring, things such as loss of sea ice, accelerated rise in the sea level and longer, more intense heat waves. Scientists believe that global temperatures will continue to rise for centuries, due to greenhouse gases that are produced by human industry. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is made up of more than 1,300 scientists, predicts a temperature rise of up to 10 degrees during the next century. According to the IPCC, the extent of climate change effects on individual regions will vary over time depending on an environmental system’s ability to adapt to change. The magnitude of climate change beyond the next few decades depends primarily on the amount of heat-trapping gases emitted globally, and how sensitive the Earth’s climate is to those emissions.Because human-induced climate change is superimposed on a naturally changing climate, the temperature rise has not been smooth or uniform across the globe. The length of the summer and spring seasons have been increasing nationally since the 1980s, with the largest increases occurring in the western United

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