global warming effects in the philippines

1 ANSWERS

1. amomipais82
   

   Hi,
   Nowadays the term 'Global Warming' is a household phrase. It is something we are reminded of occasionally in news bulletins reporting on the decline of a habitat, or freak weather conditions. But what can we actually understand about the phenomenon, and more importantly, how does it stand to affect us in the near future? Does it mean the end of our seas as we know them and will creatures that live in them struggle to survive in adverse conditions? To answer these questions we'll have to take a brief look at the science and try to comprehend the reasons why scientists think our planet is getting hotter.
   
   Global warming is the result of the build up of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, in the atmosphere. These gases reflect the suns rays back down to Earth's surface rather than letting them escape back into space as they would normally, heating the planet as a consequence. We need to have a certain quantity of these gases in the atmosphere otherwise our planet would become a frozen desert. However, too high a volume and the planet keeps heating up, ultimately causing ice caps to melt and barren wastelands to form where there would have once been habitable terrain.
   
   Records of the UK's weather patterns date back to 1861. These that show our climate is warming by about 0.2°C over each passing decade. However, scientists don't like to look at what in geological terms is very short period in the Earth's history, so they research into other areas that can provide us with a record of past climate. They use tree rings and ice cores to study the more recent past, and to look back millions of years into history they study the rocks that lie around us. Each year, trees grow outwards by a small amount. As seasons pass and temperatures alter, the amount trees grow by also changes. On a particularly cold year, a tree will not grow very much so the ring will be small. On a year that has conditions more favoured by the trees, it will grow more. So looking at a cross-section through a trees trunk, scientists can accurately tell what the climate has been like throughout the trees lifespan. Ice cores work in a similar manner, storing gas bubbles in their layers that contain vital information about the composition of the atmosphere when the bubble formed.
   
   Tree rings and ice cores show that over the past two million years ago there have been twenty glacial advances and retreats - that is to say there have been periods of time lasting hundreds of years at a time where much of the planets water has been locked as ice. This cycle is believed to continue indefinitely until some unknown factor causes the climate to warm up and become 'post-glacial'. It is not known whether we are now in an interglacial (the last glacial period ended about one thousand years ago) or if we are post-glacial, but records show significant warming in recent history.
   
   Huge differences in the climate of the past compared to ours today, combined with the fact that climate is such a difficult thing to model (due to all the many small factors that can cause unknown large-scale impacts) cause a few scientists to wonder if global warming is an issue at all. For example, if there is a big volcanic eruption somewhere on the planet and lots of ash is pumped into the upper layers of the atmosphere, global warming can be temporarily reversed. The dust prevents the suns rays penetrating through the atmosphere as easily causing global temperatures to fall by one or two degrees centigrade. But debates aside, the fact remains that over the last fifty years global temperatures have been on the increase and they are at their highest for at least the past thousand years. Many believe that the human race is largely liable for this, due to activities such as burning fossil fuels that lead to large amounts of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. Even if the planet would have been warming up regardless of man's intervention, there is no getting away from the fact that the greenhouse gases we produce are adding to the problem. If this warming trend continues, it is going to destroy many habitats and species are going to have to adapt if they want to survive - it is not an issue we can ignore for much longer.
   
   The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began recording the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in 1950. Recently it has reported record highs for atmospheric CO2 content and an acceleration of the rate of increase. It is predicted that currents trends will warm the globe by around 4°C by the year 2100. To prevent this from happening, we need to cut emissions by seventy or eighty percent to simply stabilise atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The quicker we can do this, the better. From 1890 to 1990, the planet warmed by 0.5°C. 1987 saw the warmest year on record and the 1980's were the hottest decade so far. Even the coldest years of the 1980's were warmer than the warmest years of the 1880's. 1995 beat the record held by 1987 to become the hottest year to date. 2002 is the second hottest year on record and 2003 is the third hottest. However in Europe in 2003 the summer was the hottest for 500 years and there were an estimated 30,000 deaths as a result. But worryingly greenhouse gas concentrations still keep rising along with temperatures in a period when natural influences on climate such as solar cycles and volcanic eruptions should have cooled the Earth down. In its entire history, the Earth has probably never seen warming rates as rapid as those in the past 30 years

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