GLOBAL WARMING

Global Warming

Global Warming

Introduction

Basically, all living things in the earth need heat to life. The earth's heat source is sun. In the other words, without the sun we cannot have life. Our earth has a blanket to keep the surface warm, which support the life in the earth. We call that blanket as atmosphere. Without atmosphere, the earth becomes cold. This process is known as greenhouse effect. But, nowadays the heat becomes our opponent, which is caused problems on the earth. The heat that goes to the earth's surface is more than we need. So, the earth has become warmer than it used to be. This is called global warming. Global warming is also called enhanced greenhouse effect because of the malfunction of the greenhouse gases, which are more than we need and trap more heat. This can be a big problem for every living thing, because they have to face big environmental changes. Mainly is climate change. This is all happening because of human activities. Human activities that cause this disaster, global warming, are the ones, which do not respect the earth's environmental needs, for example that connected to the gas emissions. The way out for this disaster is just making environmental balances on the earth (Walter 2006).

Factors That Cause Global Warming

Definitely, the energy that lights and warms the earth comes from the sun. The energy that goes to the earth is short-wave radiation, or visible light. When this heat energy goes to earth, soils, plants, and oceans absorb about 85 percents of energy. And the rest of this energy reflected back as long-wave radiation or infrared to the atmosphere. Atmosphere contents certain gases like water vapor, methane, carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide. These gases are called greenhouse gases. These gases work like greenhouse, which let many sunrays through the atmosphere to the earth's surface, but trap the sunrays that reflected back to the space, which make the earth's surface warm. In fact, we need these gases.

The largest gas in the atmosphere is water vapor. Water vapor created by natural evaporation process from oceans, lakes, and rivers. Water area is two-third of the earth's surface. That's why it has the largest quantity in the atmosphere (Lerner 2006).

Carbon dioxide flows to the atmosphere all the way through many processes. For example, human and animals breathe by gathering oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide as the residue of exhalation then goes to the earth's atmosphere. The other process is burning fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are fuels that made of died ancient animals and plants, which buried for very long time. Fossil fuels are coal, oil, and natural gas. However, since industry revolution, human burn more fossil fuels. As they burn more, carbon dioxide increases and trap more heat, which cause earth's surface is getting hotter and hotter.

The most common thing that caused global warming is deforestation. Deforestation is process of cutting down trees without obey the environmental needs. As the result, when the trees are cut down, less carbon ...