The Reality of Global Heating Research Paper Example

📌Category: Climate Change, Environment, Environment problems
📌Words: 952
📌Pages: 4
📌Published: 04 June 2022

It is a known fact that the Earth’s temperatures are rising at an unsustainable rate, but there are those who believe this cannot be true. As temperatures rise, the ice in the Arctic melts causing Earth’s sea levels to rise, displacing millions of coastal inhabitants, and increasing the severity of aquatic natural disasters. Graham Park discusses the strains we are placing on our planet in the chapter “The Reality of Global Heating”. There are four main topics of this chapter that revolve around global heating: How we know, the Gaia theory, the consequences, and tipping points.  

Year after year there are scientists around the world releasing studies which outline the reality of global warming, yet there are those who deny these facts. Currently there is an overwhelming number of scientists, “97%” (25), who agree that Earth’s temperature is rising, and even more damming, it is caused by human activity. In the mid 1800’s a scientist, John Tyndal, discovered that methane, water vapor, and carbon dioxide trap heat within our atmosphere and will cause global warming if not properly monitored. Fast forward around 200 years later his discovery of GHG’s still holds up. Present-day scientists are using well-tested prediction models to determine how many GHG’s we can pump into the atmosphere until we kill the Earth, but people are denying these findings. We live in a world where trust is difficult to come by, so difficult there are millions of people who actively reject scientific theories and hypotheses under the guise of “they are corrupt”. Parks points out the so-called corrupt scientists are, “employed by think tanks and institutes” (28) so instead of distrusting scientific evidence, look at who is funding these research projects. 

The second idea to discuss is the Gaia Theory, something I never knew about until this reading. The Gaia Theory was thought of by James Lovelock, it is the idea that our planet is a gigantic living being with a balanced ecosystem and has been regulating itself for billions of years. Earth, or Gaia, has regulated itself through periods of heating and cooling which is known as the “Snowball Effect”. Since humans have industrialized our planet, we have interfered with this equilibrium, “by adding GHG and subtracting forests” (29) the planet’s climate system has been artificially altered. The climate system contains the atmosphere, hydrosphere, the cryosphere, the lithosphere, and the biosphere. Humans are a part of the biosphere, so we have a subset of the climate system affecting the entire planet, and scientists are looking for ways to limit and eventually stop the effects we are generating. Our climate system is changing at an accelerated rate due to human activity and Parks uses a very fitting analogy that Gaia is, “an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers” (32). Our planet has been given resources unconditionally, but it is reaching the limit of how much it can offer. Some of the side effects of our greed have started to surface in the past couple of decades, and these effects will only become more prominent as time passes.  

Although much of the discussion about climate change is focused on what will happen in the future, Parks uses this third section to outline what is currently happening. Scientists have been warning the public of the disasters we will face if our climate continues to warm up. A study overseen by Oxfam researchers show “a five-fold increase in the reported number of extreme weather disasters that resulted in people being displaced” (33) which is about 20 million people per year. These weather disasters include droughts, tsunamis, wildfires, extreme temperatures, and hurricanes. Recently, Germany experienced unprecedented flooding, Australia went through the largest wildfire in recent history, and droughts have caused severe crop failure areas such as Syria and Mexico. Global warming is not only affecting humans, but the animals which inhabit this planet as well. Studies have found that “Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles since 1970” (35) and as time passes more creatures will be forced into extinction. There is time to slow down these disasters and hopefully reverse the damage, but there are outlined tipping points which set the limit of damage our planet can take. 

Lastly, we will go over the known tipping points that will lead to uncontrollable global heating. One of the most well-known examples of a tipping point is the melting of our polar ice caps which have resulted in increased ocean level. As the ice heats, “the tundra and the permafrost on which it sits begins to melt which releases methane and warms the atmosphere far more effectively than carbon dioxide” (36). The ice caps also assist in reflecting the sun’s rays off the surface of the Earth, so now we have an increased amount of methane and heat trapped on the planet’s surface. Yet another notable tipping point is The Amazon Forest, "‘the lungs of the earth’ which usually breathe in more carbon than they exhale turn into a steady source of carbon emissions” (37). It has turned into a source of carbon emission due to the side effects of deforestation. Should the Brazilian government continue with their mission to industrialize the Amazon Forest we will lose one of our main sources of carbon elimination and the home to thousands of species.  

“The Reality of Global Heating” is a serious wake-up call sort of way to start a book. I have family and friends who believe global warming is a false sort of science, and it is painful to see people so lost in their own world, too ignorant to see what is happening right in front of them. Our planet is a living thing whose equilibrium has been thrown so off balance it has resulted in the death of thousands of species. I hope that soon our politicians will stop taking the money of big corporations and listen to scientists. I hope that soon people will listen to scientists when they say we are at a breaking point of how much damage our planet can handle and find a way to restore what we have taken.

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