The Eleventh Hour???

Global Warming is defined by Wikipedia as an observed increase in average temperature of earth’s atmosphere and oceans in recent decades due to a natural or anthropogenic climate changes.
It’s a major problem affecting the world and has been stated as the reason for the intensity of many of the natural calamities in recent times. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased to such a level that anything short of a thousand years wouldn’t be useful in getting the climate back to normal even if carbon dioxide emissions are stopped completely, according to Susan Solomon, NOAA Scientist.
The end result of global warming if summarized would be increase in sea levels, flooding of low lying areas, droughts in places which had ample rainfall and floods in areas which had scant rainfall previously, forest fires, decrease in water supplies, extinction of animal and plant species, coral bleaching, et cetera.
A closer look at each of these problems indicates that most of them are interlinked. With increase in global temperature due to the increased emission of green house gases, the glaciers and ice caps are melting at a frightening pace. As the temperatures continue to rise the probability that Antarctica would fully submerge are increasing and this may result in a epidemic sized problem with the heavily populated areas of the Culcutta (India), Shangai (China) and the New York (USA ) being washed away and refugees being estimated to be north of a billion.
Also, this increased temperature could be stated as one of the main culprits of the increased and wider variety of diseases being discovered by the day. The hot climate as opposed to the cold facilitates the effective reproduction of bacteria and hence the more persistent diseases we are suffering from each day.
Another major issue which causes concern is the forest fires. Previously it was thought that the forest fires occurred in areas where it was uncultivated to regain fertility of the soil but the recent increase in fires where cultivation is impossible has shown that the number of increased fires are due to global warming. According to sources, the fires are approximately 6.5 times worse hitting and about 2.5 times the usual area of the forests are burnt up and its becoming tougher to contain as they are occurring more often.
Another important resource that may be affected due to global warming is food. The number of untimely floods and droughts may plunge the world into a major food crisis. This coupled with the flash floods washing away the top soil has in fact become another major concern.
As Al Gore said in his “An Inconvenient Truth”, the trees breathe in and breathe out just as we humans do. But what we don’t realize is that while we are providing the greenery in the world with tons of carbon dioxide which we somehow expect to be tuned into oxygen over night what we don’t realize is that we go around cutting down trees. Statistics say that over 25 million trees are chopped each year to make chopsticks and in a measure to prevent deforestation, China has began charging a five percent tax on wooden chopsticks. Another problem is the large scale deforestation of the rain forests. How we expect to combat global warming is still a mystery to me when we are working against mother nature and in every right destroying this once beautiful planet??
On an ending note I’d like to bring attention to the fact that what would happen if global warming continues. Scientists say that many parts of the world and to be more specific just about half of the world’s heavily inhabited areas would become too hot to live in. That’s something to ponder about. It truly is…