Effects of Global Warming on Climatic Change??

picture showing animals dying from hot weather due to climatic change.



Climate change affects everyone. Have you noticed that the soil is drying out faster after a heavy rainfall? Or have you witnessed your beautiful landscape garden falling victim to the scorching heat, with flowers withering away? This is due to the climate change brought about by global warming. Recurrent heat waves, droughts and floods are some other consequences of global warming.

Plants and animals are also not spared of the adverse effects of global warming. Forests are affected by ecosystem changes. The flora and fauna may not be able to adapt and they may face extinction.

Global warming also causes the polar caps to melt. Low lying land may eventually become flooded as the sea level rises. There will be more storms and hurricanes. Polar bears could be threatened. When snow and ice melt, their ability to reflect sunlight is lost. This escalates global warming even further.

Global Warming effects On Weather

 

 

 

 

 

Picture shows heavy storm coming

Global warming contributes to both floods and droughts

Flooding

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program issued a report predicting an increase in extreme weather in North America, including both floods and droughts, as a result of global warming. There is strong evidence that that heavy downpours will become more common and more severe along with the rise in global temperature.

Droughts

But what, you might ask, does this have to do with droughts? As director of the National Climatic Data Center Thomas Karl explains, “When it rains, it rains harder and when it’s not raining, it’s warmer – there is more evaporation, and droughts can last longer.

The effect on hurricanes

The evidence on hurricanes is more mixed. Some scientists have hypothesized that warmer ocean surface temperatures will lead to an increase in hurricanes and tropical storms, but this may not actually be the case.

Hurricanes may become less frequent as the temperature of the Atlantic Ocean rises, suggests a recent study in Nature Geoscience. However, the study, which relies on historical weather data and computer simulations, does suggest that heavy rainfall may increase from storms that do not reach tropical storm status.

How Will Global Warming Affect Food  Production

Picture showing how global warming is affecting crops.

Most researchers believe that higher temperatures and droughts caused by climate change will depress crop yields in many places in the coming decades. But a recent consensus has emerged that rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide could come to the rescue. The gas thought to be behind global warming could also speed up photosynthesis, counteracting the negative effects of warming and even ushering in an era of bumper crops.

But Long told the two-day meeting on crops and future climate that this conclusion was a dangerous illusion. It was, he said, based on results from tests in gas chambers and small greenhouses known to be unreliable.

Long reported instead on the findings of four studies in the US, China and Japan that all test crops in open fields. In these Free-Air Concentration Enrichment experiments, gases such as CO₂ were piped into the air around plants - a world first.

Ozone-unfriendly

The FACE experiments showed that for all four of the world's main food crops - maize, rice, soybean and wheat - the real-world fertilization effect was only half as great as predicted by the contained experiments.

Meanwhile, in some FACE experiments, Long added a new variable not factored into previous studies. He puffed doses of ozone into the fields to simulate the expected rise in ozone smogs due to higher temperatures - and yields crashed. A 20% increase in ozone levels cut yields by 20%, he said.

Increases in ozone levels of this level are predicted for Europe, the US, China, India and much of the middle east by 2050. If Long's findings prove correct, even CO₂ fertilisation will not prevent the world's crop yields from declining by 10% to 15%.

Effects Of Global Warming in humans

Human Health

Rising temperatures have an effect on the health of humans and the diseases that they are exposed to.

Human health will be affected. The world glimpsed this in 2003 when Europe was struck by heat waves and people died. Heat strokes are likely to increase as temperatures get hotter.

Diseases such as malaria are likely to spread. Parasites that originate in tropical regions may migrate to temperate regions as they become warmer. Mosquitoes are an example and it is predicted that malaria will spread around the world. It is also predicted that asthma will increase around the world as allergens that cause asthma will become more common.

How does Global warming Affect Animals?

pic shows animal suspended on thin ice due to global warming.

There is no doubt whatsoever that global warming is affecting the whole planet. Climate change is forcing every living creature on our planet to adapt to climate change. As the global warming impact becomes stronger and stronger, animals find it more and more difficult to adapt. And the worst thing is that this is only a start of something that will become much worse in years to come. Changed weather conditions and more frequent extreme weather events will cause many animals to go extinct.

Many people mostly connect global warming with ice melting and polar bears. Sadly polar bears are not the only animals affected with global warming. Global warming isn't only affecting polar regions but the whole planet. Yes, Arctic is really rapidly melting making polar bears survival very questionable, but thousands of other animal species are struggling as well.

Many scientists believe how global warming will not have the worst impact on animals that live in polar regions but on the ones that live in tropics. Many tropical animal species are at great jeopardy of going extinct even with the temperature rise of just a degree or two simply because these species are familiar to live in environment within a very small temperature range, and any temperature increase above this range is likely to cause their extinction as they will have not enough time to adapt.

Adaptation to new climate conditions will mean the difference between survival and extinction for many animal species. The ones that will be able to adapt will have chance for survival while others will end up in history books under "animals that used to live on our planet". Though this situation looks like the nature's "survival of the strongest" there's still very big difference between nature selection and "global warming selection". While nature knows exactly how much time certain species need to adapt to new conditions, man-made global warming is coming to soon, not giving enough time to species to adapt, therefore heavily decreasing their chances for survival.

Effects of Global warming on Agriculture sector

Positive effects

Organic agriculture can remove from the air and sequester 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per acre per year. The Rodale Institute study that found that staggering number also found that, when properly executed, organic agriculture does not compromise yield. As a matter of fact, in drought years, it increases yield, since the additional carbon stored in soil helps it to hold more water. In wet years, the additional organic matter in the soil wicks water away from plant roots, limiting erosion and keeping plants in place. Both of those attributes will also benefit organic ag's ability to adapt to the higher highs (and lower lows) of climate change.

 

 

 

 

 

Negative Effects

Industrial agriculture's huge carbon footprint

On the other side of the equation, industrial agriculture -- the practice currently employed by the majority of the developed world -- has a hugely negative impact on global warming. The U.S. food system contributes nearly 20 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide emissions; on a global scale, figures from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say that agricultural land use contributes 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Supporting industrial agriculture perpetuates these disturbing practices.

Greenhouse gas emissions from fertilizer and pesticide use

But wait, there's more! If we consider some of the embodied energy required for industrial ag, it gets worse. According to Will Allen, green farmer extraordinaire, including all the "manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers, fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping, electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating, and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases" bumps the impact up to between 25 and 30 percent of the U.S.'s collective carbon footprint. That's a big jump.

How does Global warming affect the U.S economy?

 

 

 

 

 

Graph showing negative effects of global warming on the U.S Economy

 

What Are the Negative Effects of Global Warming on the U.S. Economy?:

A shorter winter means that many pests, such as the pine bark beetle, are not dying off in the winter and are killing millions of trees. Warmer summers have led to an increase in forest fires. The dead trees have increased the intensity of these fires, leading to destruction of timber. (Source: IPCC Climate Change 2007)

 

2007)
Longer summers have led to an increase in the allergy season and increased health care costs for asthma and allergy sufferers. In addition, increased air pollution kills 1,000 U.S. residents for every 1°C increase in temperatures. (Source: AmMedNews.com, "Health risks heating up?" April 21, 2008)

Increased Hurricanes Cost U.S. Billions:

Many experts believe that global warming increases the size and frequency of hurricanes. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina created $125 billion in damage, with $66 billion in insured losses.It caused GDP to decline from 3.8% in Q3 to 1.3% in Q4 2005. In 2008, Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike hit the U.S. Though they did not cause as much damage, they support the trend of more frequent and more severe hurricanes caused by global warming.

How Do Efforts to Curb Global Warming Affect the U.S. Economy?:

In 2007, the Department of Energy invested $1 billion to spur the biofuels industry. Last year, over 100 biofuel factories produced 6.4 billion gallons of ethanol using 18 million acres of corn. This was 20% of total U.S. corn production, which drove corn prices to a record $4 per bushel. Since most of corn production is used to feed livestock, this food prices increased four percent. (Source: Department of Energy, Biomass 2008: Fueling Our Future, April 2008; MIT Technology Review, The Price of Biofuels, January/February 2008)

Global warming threatens marine life

From tropical coral reefs to polar-ice edge communities, and from tiny zooplankton to polar bears, scientists have documented worrying declines in marine life which they believed could be at attributed, at least partly, to the impact of global warming.

Surface water temperature had risen by about one degree Celsius over the past century and were expected to increase by up to

another three degrees in the next 100 years if emissions - caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels like oil and gas - continued at current rates.

Marine life already was threatened by a number of human activities, the report pointed out. Overfishing had resulted in the collapse of major fisheries, and destructive fishing practices like bottom trawling had devastated the habitat of the sea floor.

Coastal development and other activities that resulted in the pollution of coastal waters had converted whole ares of the oceans into so-called "dead zones," while the invasion of alien species, often carried in ships' ballast water to distant habitats, has wiped out many native marine species around the world.

What Causes Global Warming?

One of the first things scientists learned is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, also called CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills and agriculture (especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals), nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2.
Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons (which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer), have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does.

In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of "carbon dioxide equivalent" worldwide, more than a 20 percent increase.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5pxnNc_TZQ

The planet is warming, from North Pole to South Pole, and everywhere in between. Globally, the mercury is already up more than 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius), and even more in sensitive polar regions. And the effects of rising temperatures aren’t waiting for some far-flung future. They’re happening right now. Signs are appearing all over, and some of them are surprising. The heat is not only melting glaciers and sea ice, it’s also shifting precipitation patterns and setting animals on the move.

Some impacts from increasing temperatures are already happening.

• Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. This includes mountain glaciers, ice sheets covering West Antarctica and Greenland, and Arctic sea ice.
• Researcher Bill Fraser has tracked the decline of the Adélie penguins on Antarctica, where their numbers have fallen from 32,000 breeding pairs to 11,000 in 30 years.
• Sea level rise became faster over the last century.
• Some butterflies, foxes, and alpine plants have moved farther north or to higher, cooler areas.
• Precipitation (rain and snowfall) has increased across the globe, on average.
• Spruce bark beetles have boomed in Alaska thanks to 20 years of warm summers. The insects have chewed up 4 million acres of spruce trees.