Global Warming - Causes, Impacts, the Way Ahead Essay

Global Warming - Causes, Impacts, the Way Ahead - Essay Example The effects of global warming are already obvious as many of the impacts are adversely experienced by the common man these days. For instance, there have been notable variations in the climatic patterns all around the globe. In last couples of decades, the incidence of climatic disasters like floods, hurricanes, landslides and droughts became more and more frequent at different parts of the world. There is widespread consensus in the scientific community that driving force behind climatic changes can be attributed to 20th-century humans’ activities that disturbed the natural atmospheric and the ecological balance and eventually leads to climate change and global warming. The objective of this easy is to analyses the causes and impacts of global warming. The last century industrial revolution greatly influenced global surface temperatures by raising the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and hence changing the concentrations of aerosols and ozone layer. These changes modified the land cover of earth’s surface and it changed the radiative balance governing the earth on various timescales and at varying spatial scales. Various studies show that in last 100 years the average temperature of the air near earth’s surface has risen by 1.3 Fahrenheit (Venkataramanan & Smitha, 2011). The increase in temperature results various changes in the physical system of earth. For instance, it accelerates the melting of glaciers and poles ice that raises the sea level. The rise in sea level would have devastating effects as it would submerge a large number of islands like the Maldives laying at very low sea level and hence hundreds of thousands of human lives would be at risk. Also, the rise in global temperature changes the wind pattern across the globe. It would result in colder winters in Europe and more rain in West Africa. On the other hand, there would be an acute scarcity of rain in central Africa (Venkataramanan & Smitha, 2011).