global environment

Report : Mitigating Global Warming

Introduction

Change in global climate became a widely accepted social problem in the last two decades . However , in those early days , controversies existed about the certainty of global warming while scientist and environmentalist pointed out that the world was getting hotter due to the increasing release of greenhouse gases and other human activities multinational corporations and some national governments refuted such claims , under the guise that there were no sufficient scientific evidence to support such claims (McCright and Dunlap , 2000 . Fortunately or unfortunately , recent scientific evidences

point , irrefutably , to the fact that the world is indeed getting dangerously hotter

The Stanford SOLAR Center defines global warming as the 'gradual increase in planet wide temperatures , while McCright and Dunlap (2000 defines it as 'discernable increase in mean global temperature resulting from the release of greenhouse gases produced by human activities (p .499 . Whichever way global warming is defined , the apparent truth , as has been voiced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC the U .S National Research Council , the American Geophysical Union (AGU and countless other bodies and research institutions , is that the globe is hotter than it has ever been in history and if nothing urgent is done , serious danger looms

The Problem

In the early days when stories about a warming earth was first heard there were several counterclaims and numerous challenges to scientist to prove that the earth was indeed getting hotter . In recent times however , it is clear that the issue of global warming has passed that stage . There are now countless irrefutable evidences from both government and private interests to show that there is indeed a problem at hand . The Stanford SOLAR Center points out that it is certain now that the earth is presently the hottest it has been in at least 400years and possibly even over the last 2 ,000years . It has been shown that the mean global surface temperature has increased by an estimated 0 .5-1 .0 ?F (0 .3-0 .6 ?C ) within the last century alone and this is documented as the largest temperature rise in surface temperature over the last 1 ,000years . The IPCC (2007a ) also states that eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006 ) rank among the twelve hottest years since record of global surface temperature started in 1850

They also stated that from 1900 to 2005 , precipitation increased significantly in the eastern parts of the North and South America Northern Europe and Northern and Central Asia and that the most significant increases were experienced from 1970 onward . To buttress this stand , the body pointed out that in the last fifty years , cold days and cold nights have been significantly infrequent , while hot days and hot nights have become more frequent . The frequency and intensity of heat waves and heavy precipitation events over land areas have increased globally , especially since 1975 . Further , there is irrefutable evidence that the average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the last half of the 20th century were the highest observable in...