Global Warming and Climate Change
Natural versus anthropogenic forces in climate change are a common topic for discussion. Some people believe that the global warming experienced now is part of a natural cycle while other others believe it is accelerated thanks to human evolution on earth. Although there is a natural cycle on the planet concerning global warming, this is not the case regarding the information provided from scientific data on the effects of human-generated global warming. Natural global warming takes long periods of time to develop.
People that have analyzed previous global warming trends have noted the rise in temperatures occurred over a prolonged period, like thousands of years. However, human-caused global warming has produced a warming trend at a faster rate. Instead of thousands of years, it is decades. Secondly, humans were not around for the previous global warming trends and if they were, they were much smaller in number than they are now. The Last Ice Age for example, humans numbered in the thousands versus the billions that are on the planet today.
That ice age, which was around 70,000 years ago, was helped by something that occurs naturally on earth with no intervention by humans, volcanoes. The Toba super volcano erupted and set off natural climate change that would create a colder ice age for years. " . . . it's a safe guess that Toba "dimmed the sun for six years, disrupted seasonal rains, choked off streams and scattered whole cubic miles of hot ash (imagine wading through a giant ashtray) across acres and acres of plants" (KRULWICH, 2012). This climate change may have resulted in a potential bottleneck of the human population and an altered state of weather that created twenty plus degree drops in certain places.
The same can be said...
"Recently, scientific discoveries suggest the onset of abrupt cooling during the Younger Dryas was triggered by the impact of fragmented comets exploding in the atmosphere over North America at 10,900 BC" (Gross, 2016, p. 40). Although there is no proof yet of a comet hitting earth at the time, there is proof that the rapid cooling did exist and did last for one thousand years. This evidence shows that natural disasters can trigger global climate changes without human intervention. However, anthropogenic climate changes do occur.
For example, during the colonial times of the United States, the amount of deforestation that occurred thanks to the coming of new settlers, led to increased rainfall according to some historians. " . . . described a change in climatic conditions in the North American colonies, and linked this favorable change to the ongoing settlement that produced increased drainage and deforestation" (Storch, 2012, p. 268). Although there is no real example of anthropogenic climate changes because of the limited data available for analysis, many do believe a good example of such effects is if the increased carbon dioxide in the earth thanks to human evolution. The increase in technology has led to a use of chemicals and machines that increase the output of greenhouse emissions. These gases could lead to and have led to rising sea levels within the last century (Storch, 2012).
When discussing global warming, I personally believe it is taking place and human evolution has put the earth in a predicament that could lead to dramatic shifts in global climate in the next few decades. Although natural events like volcanoes and…
