Causes Of Global Warming Essay Sample

Have you ever taken the time to break down how much we are polluting our atmosphere? If not you should, it's worse than you think.

The population is a leading cause of pollution in my opinion. With our population keeping at this steady rise, we have more people than this planet can tolerate. With more people comes more pollution and more resources being used than if we had fewer people on this earth. The world’s population is rising by 1.10 percent per year, or approximately an additional 83 million people annually. This means that the global population is expected to surpass 9.7 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100¹. That is simply unsustainable long term and we will diminish all of our natural resources.

To put it simply, we are overpopulated, and with overpopulation comes the risk of disease and famine as well as the increase in pollution, and that all leads to increased global warming. But just having too many people is not the issue, the real concern lies within the greenhouse effect and all things that contribute to that, some of these include transportation, shipping, and over-farming. Transportation is a top cause because 7 billion people travel 30 kilometers to and from work each day and 40 kilometers accounting for groceries, sports, or just leisure is 100 kilometers per person or 700 billion kilometers of transportation in a car each day. On average 100 kilometers of driving uses about 8.6 liters² and 100km. 8.6 liters x 7 billion is 60.2 billion gallons of gas each day. Not accounting for airplanes which in themselves produce 250 kg of CO2 per hour flown³. Now think of all the flights flown per day for vacation, work, or even a private plane for fun. The average person flies roughly 50 hours per year⁴ and that adds up. That is 20 tonnes of CO2 each year per person. Shipping goods by boat also uses a lot of gas and releases a lot of harmful emissions into the atmosphere but I couldn't find a direct number on that.

 Another primary cause of global warming is the term “overuse”. The reason behind that phrase being important is that it displays over-farming, overuse of trees, overproduction of cattle, and our severe overuse of fossil fuels. We will begin with over-farming. Over-farming is when you cultivate too many similar crops in a dense area. This leads to soil erosion because all the roots are the same, all the nutrients that only those plants need are being all used up, and lastly, it can lead to a plant plague. If there is a virus that only attacks that variety of plants it will wipe it out and that would be devastating to our food supply. If you had diversified these crops beforehand, this would be minimized. It will still hurt having all of one crop die but you still have the food from the others to get you through this inevitable struggle. And the soil erosion that I stated before we have already witnessed this before in the USA. It was called “The Dust Bowl” and it demolished the entire midwest and lasted 5 years. There are photos of houses, cars, and people buried after these extreme sandstorms. The same goes for animals. If you only have one species of one type of animal and then all of a sudden a virus breaks out it will just end them all. Extinction. And you won't have or be able to create any more food. Now let's say we have chickens, cows, sheep, and goats. If all the cows die it will be terrible but you could still get milk from the goat, and meat from the chickens and still have the sheep left over to trade.

Two things are worse for the earth than either of those, fossil fuels and deforestation. Deforestation is caused when you cut trees down faster than they can grow to leave the forests and jungles with fewer and fewer trees per year. The clearing crew uses fossil fuels to use their tools and pollute the earth as well. Each year we deforest around ten million hectares of forest every year⁵. That's an area the size of Portugal every year that will never grow back. There are regrow forests but those are prone to using the same tree and in the grand scheme of things they simply do not work.

Now onto the thing, you have all been waiting for, Fossil Fuels! Fossil fuels are ancient carbon structures that through heat and pressure transformed into a different molecule and that just so happened to be very nice at creating energy. These fossil fuels when used release a multitude of dangerous and potentially deadly substances up into the atmosphere. Fossil fuels aren't just producing CO2 into the atmosphere but they are also producing other dangerous components like sulfur monoxide and nitrogen oxide. Both of those chemicals have ties to lifelong ailments such as Leukemia and blood issues and these are especially prevalent in children. In addition to being a major health risk and the main contributor to global warming they are just messy to produce, they need to be refined a multitude of times and have chemicals added to them and then they are finally usable.

In conclusion, global warming can not be solved by restoring just one thing, we are too far gone. We need to rally and unite against this foe we and our world face. The reason that global warming got this far is simply because of human morals. We are greedy, selfish, and egotistical people. We go with the herd, if someone does something we all follow along until it is normal, that is fossil fuels. Politicians are also to blame, they would rather support their party and fill their pockets than choose the correct decision. I hope we can revert our damages because there is no planet B.