The Wake up call : Increase in Earth’s warming: The Global Issue

Rtr. Dilhan Jayasinghe

The increasing average air temperature near the surface of earth is the simplest meaning of this issue, on which we are going to give our readers a ‘wake-up call’.  Why do we have to care about the rise in temperature? Is it a significant rise? What are the causative factors of global warming? And what are the effects of this phenomena? 

The global warming is aligned with the term known as the ‘Green House Effect’.

As we know, the sun as well as the earth can emit radiation which is simply called as the emission of energy. Global warming is a result of the reduction in the emission of radiation out of the earth’s atmosphere and increase in accumulation of that energy. This simply results in an increment in the heat, thus the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere. 

Greenhouse gases play an important role in accumulating the heat energy within our earth. Some of the greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide, water vapor and methane. 

Does the global warming caused by the greenhouse effect, an obstruction to the existence?   To understand this, we should remember that the existence of carbon dioxide is not only due to human activities.  Lot of natural processes also emit this gas, especially during the exhalation of living beings. Therefore, greenhouse effect cannot be a new phenomenon. It has been there since the existence of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. Then why did the Global Warming become a much important topic in the last few decades? 

Due to the human contributions to nature, especially after the industrial revolution, the emission of greenhouse gases has been increasing. Hence, the increase in greenhouse effect has been the reason behind the increment in the global temperature. We expect the natural level of greenhouse effect to persist, thereby maintaining the suitable temperature for the living beings, without letting it to fall down to higher negative values. But human interference has led to an increase in this level of greenhouse effect. The most effective greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide and methane. As we have discussed in previous articles, burning of fossil fuels in many industries including in electricity generation has led to the disastrous increase in the emissions of carbon dioxide. 

As the temperature rises, the frozen methane which exist in the near earth surface in areas such as Serbia can start melting, which may exponentially increase global warming. Hence it is important to concentrate on ways of minimizing the emission of such greenhouse gases to our atmosphere.

 In our next article, let’s see the ways in which we can contribute to this and why it must be considered as a global objective.