Global Warming: Cause and Mitigation
Assignment 2: Global Warming: Cause and Mitigation
Due Week 9 and worth 160 points
Among the most controversial topics in physical science, global warming has received a great deal of attention during the past decade. Given its great impacts on both humans and the environment, lawmakers and scientists must weigh heavily the information that they are presented. Explore this debate in more detail by evaluating both the scientific basis of this phenomenon and the human role in global warming.
Write a three to five (3-5) page paper in which you:
Compare and contrast natural versus anthropogenic climate changes. Include specific examples of each.
Take a position as to whether or not global warming is taking place. Provide three (3) lines of evidence to support your position.
Assess two (2) current mitigation strategies for global warming, such as carbon sequestration, carbon taxing, clean coal technology, higher fuel efficiency standards, and so on. Include a discussion on the effectiveness of this mitigation strategy, as well as its potential costs and policy implications.
Speculate what policy changes you would propose to help stabilize global climate and which business sectors or nations would be held to more strict standards if you implement your proposed policies.
Use at least four (4) quality resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar Websites do not qualify as quality resources. The body of the paper must have in-text citations that correspond to the references. Integrate all sources into your paper using proper techniques of quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing, along with proper use of in-text citations to credit your sources
Your report must follow these formatting requirements:
Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.
The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:
Apply concepts in physical sciences to evaluate current trends and issues in the modern world.
Describe the physical processes influencing climate and weather, including the roles of natural and anthropogenic activity on climate.
Use technology and information resources to research issues in physical sciences.
Write clearly and concisely about physical sciences using proper writing mechanics.
Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic/organization of the paper, and language and writing skills, using the following rubric.
Click here to view the grading rubric.
GLOBAL WARMING: CAUSE AND MITIGATION
(NAME)
(SCHOOL)
Global warming is a fact that the entire world needs to face. Although there may be diverging perspective on the causes of global warming, the reality remains that the earth’s energy reserves of fossil fuels are diminishing. We have a few years before the non-renewable resource of fossil fuels are gone. Thus, there is the need to search for another energy source. This is not only urgent but absolutely important. Otherwise we will go back into another extinction or ice age. The nation state of the entire earth has the supreme task of making sure that internal combustion using fossil fuels are stopped and regulated. Meanwhile, it is time to really search for another source of energy ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Union of Concerned Scientists", "given" : "", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "The Union of Concerned Scientists", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2009" ] ] }, "publisher-place" : "Ohio", "title" : "Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Midwest", "type" : "report" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=08dadac4-a2e7-4d7c-ad79-a1bbbdb3659c" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009). Companies and corporations have little legal accountability to the citizens. They are only moved by profit. The responsibility falls on governments to ultimately mitigate the impact of global warming and to lessen and finally cease carbon emissions while finding another source of power.
There are different perspectives of the cause of global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), having 130 governments as well as climate scientists all over the world arrived at a planetary consensus that global warming is happening because of the impact of the emissions of carbon caused by the burning of fossil fuels. Unbelievably, some sectors still argue that the warming that is happening now is natural and simply geological. I have reason to believe that global warming is neither conspiracy nor a hoax. There is clear scientific proof that reveals CO2 absorption in the planet’s Greenhouse. Scientists isolated the CO2 that arises from fossil fuel burning showing direct evidence that this single cause is the greatest variable in creating global warming ADDIN CSL_CITATION { "citationItems" : [ { "id" : "ITEM-1", "itemData" : { "author" : [ { "dropping-particle" : "", "family" : "Union of Concerned Scientists", "given" : "", "non-dropping-particle" : "", "parse-names" : false, "suffix" : "" } ], "container-title" : "The Union of Concerned Scientists", "id" : "ITEM-1", "issued" : { "date-parts" : [ [ "2009" ] ] }, "publisher-place" : "Ohio", "title" : "Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Midwest", "type" : "report" }, "uris" : [ "/documents/?uuid=08dadac4-a2e7-4d7c-ad79-a1bbbdb3659c" ] } ], "mendeley" : { "formattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)", "plainTextFormattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)", "previouslyFormattedCitation" : "(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009)" }, "properties" : { "noteIndex" : 0 }, "schema" : "https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json" }(Union of Concerned Scientists, 2009). Scientist have isolated the ability of CO2 to bring heat back to our planet from other various gases and saw that only CO2 has the greatest capacity, compared to other gases.
Advocates of the natural causes say that the main reason for global warming is the sun. However scientists have already isolated the sun’s effect of heat and saw that this is minimal compared to the impact of CO2.
According to radiative physics and decades of laboratory measurements, increased CO2 in the atmosphere is expected to absorb more infrared radiation as it escapes back out to space. In 1970, NASA launched the IRIS satellite measuring infrared spectra. In 1996, the Japanese Space Agency launched the IMG satellite which recorded similar observations. Both sets of data were compared to discern any changes in outgoing radiation over the 26 year period CITATION Joh01 \l 1033 (John E. Harries, 2001).
What they found was a drop in outgoing radiation at the wavelength bands that greenhouse gases such as CO2 and methane (CH4) absorb energy. The change in outgoing radiation was consistent with theoretical expectations. Thus the paper found "direct experimental evidence for a significant increase in the Earth's greenhouse effect". This result has been confirmed by subsequent papers using data from later satellites CITATION Che07 \l 1033 (Chen, 2007).
Figure12: Change in spectrum from 1970 to 1996 due to trace gases. 'Brightness temperature' indicates equivalent blackbody temperature (Harries 2001).
Another major argument is that 97% percent of scientists representing 60 credible worldwide scientific organizations all agree to this scientific data. And those who still maintain that global warming is a hoax were exposed to be agents of corporations who stand to gain from oil production. Out of the seven hundred dissenting scientists that Senator Inhofe with other skeptics, only 10% are real climate scientists, while only 15% have published in journals climate science literature which are peer-reviewed.(See: ...