Speech on Global Warming Essay

I would like to begin with a statement. Our earth is in trouble. Can anyone of you argue with that? I suppose you could argue. And why is that? Because you have never deeply researched the concepts of either global warming or climate change. So what can we learn from that? The first step of solving a problem is being aware of it. So you would ask â€Å"what is global warming?† Global warming is exactly what you hear. The warming of the globe. The earth’s climate gets hotter and hotter until icebergs start melting causing massive floods, forests are burning and whole areas are left without any water because it has vaporized. So global warming can affect the economy of the countries, the health of the people and the life expectancy of our planet. If that is not a major problem, I don’t know what it is. So, being aware. In a set of explanatory studies and mental model interviews that was conducted in 1994 responders regarded climate change as both bad and high likel y. So far so good. But the majority of them confused stratospheric ozone depletion with the greenhouse effect which are two completely different phenomena. Explanation of ozone destruction with the two lines, the cloud and the human activities (a cloud that protects us from harmful sun rays. But it’s just a cloud. The gases that came from human creations like sprays and cars started â€Å"attacking† to the cloud and that was so fragile that it opened allowing some harmful sun rays enter our atmosphere.) So the responders were answering that the reasons for global warming are the use of car, emissions from industrial processes and pollution. And of course most of the solutions that they were proposing were things like â€Å"we have to focus on controlling pollution†. I have news for you. The hole in the ozone layer is not the main cause of global warming. Global warming is linked mainly to the green house effect which is caused by the gathering of too much carbon dio xide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxides are in the green gasses emitted from the burning of fossil fuels. Those dioxides trap infrared radiation and do not let it leave the earth’s atmosphere, resulting in warmer low atmospheric layers than the upper ones. Think of it as a blanket, trapping heat and warming the planet. I believe you are all familiar with sprays. Sprays used to contain some particles called chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs in short. Those were the main reason for the hole in the ozone layer. In 1989 CFCs were banned by the Montreal Protocol. Then,  it was noticed that global warming slowed down. But like I said, the slowing down was not because the destruction of the ozone was mainly paused but because CFCs were 17,000 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than carbon dioxides. So after managing being aware of the problem, one has to also recognize its existence in order to solve it. Despite the desperate attempts of scientists and the earth itself to tell us that there is a major issue that needs to be tackled immediately there is still a number of people denying the very existence of the issue. There is a â€Å"climate change denial† which is, â€Å"quote†, â€Å"a set of organized attempts to downplay, deny or dismiss the scientific consensus on the extent of global warming, its significance, and its connection to human behavior.† So those people are denying, not ignoring, denying, the scientific proofs of global warming and the relation with the human activities. Yeah, so the earth one day decided to start destroying itself. As for the significance of the problem, I will let the events speak for themselves: 1) 2000, studies claimed confidently that greenhouse gases had contributed to floods in Britain, 2) 2010, heat wave (a long period pf time when a region has an abnormally hot weather) struck Russia, killing 50,000, 3) 2011, Hurricane Irene slams into the United states killing 45 people and leaving $10 billion in damages 4) 2011 Texas and Oklahoma suffer from the worst one-year drought on record 5) July 2011 – June 2012, the hottest 12 months ever recorded, 6) January – June 2012 the hottest 6 months ever recorded. I could go on until tomorrow. So its like the earth is screaming â€Å"I’m burning here!† and some people are just answering â€Å"yeah right†, or not listen at all. So now I will leave the decision up to you. Will you decide to listen?