Enviromental issues (carbon footprints) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Enviromental issues (carbon footprints) - Essay Example According to the American Meteorological Society (AMS, 2007), the direct human impact on the climate change is through the enhanced concentration of trace gases such as carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and water vapor which, collectively, are known as the greenhouse gases. With the enhanced amounts of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, the infrared radiation emitted by the earth and its atmosphere is blocked by the thickening blanket of greenhouse gases, resulting to increased warmth in the earth’s temperature in its attempt to equalize the incoming and outgoing flows of energy. AMS (2007) further reports that Carbon dioxide (CO₂) accounts for about half of the human-induced greenhouse gas contribution to global warming since the latter part of 1800s. CO₂ concentration has been increasing mainly from fossil fuel burning and partly from clearing of vegetation. Significant part (50%) of the increased CO₂ emissions remains in the atmosphere, while the rest of the earth absorbs continually the remaining 50%. Interestingly alarming is that the atmospheric CO₂ concentration has been increasing at a much faster rate than any other observed in the past several thousand years’ geological record. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF, 2009) reports that around 97 percent of the CO₂ emitted by the western industrialized nations is mainly coming from burning coal, oil and gas energy. The western industrialized nations spew into the atmosphere approximately 25 billion metric tons of CO₂ each year, which is enough to cause temperature build-up that seriously disrupts the world climate’s natural balance. As the scientific community continues to understand, monitor and discover things about the environmental changes happening around the globe, it also tries to translate scientific discoveries into