Global Warming

Global warming impacts everyone. It is creating unpredictably shifting weather patterns leading to droughts as well as more frequent and intense storms and forest fires. Rising sea levels caused by melting ice will threaten islands and low lying coastal land and cities.

Global warming threats to California: The snow pack in the Sierra Nevada could shrink up to 90 percent during this century, with serious impacts on the state's water supply. The risk of large wildfires in the state could increase by 55 percent. Increased frequency of heat waves may cause the incidence of heat-related illnesses and deaths to rise. Higher temperatures would cause higher energy demands.

Environmental problems faced by the Inland Region, smog, wildfires and water scarcity, will worsen.

Deforestation causes global warming. Twenty-five to thirty percent of greenhouse gases released in the atmosphere each year is caused by deforestation. That's because trees take up carbon dioxide from the air and store it as carbon. When the trees are cut down, or burn up, the stored carbon is again released as carbon dioxide. Forests also help regulate rainfall and keep the atmosphere cool.

Climate action in Europe: Climate change and what to do about it is now on the top of the EU's agenda, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Brussels.

U.N. Secretary General calls global warming a priority and warns that the destruction it will inflict, including loss of arable land due to droughts and coastal flooding, is likely to be a "major driver of war and conflict" in the coming decades.

Hawaiian islands threatened to be submerged by global warming: Findings of a team of Hawaii-based scientists suggest that 65 percent of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, and the rare, vulnerable wildlife inhabiting them, could be lost by 2100.

Global economic disaster could result from global warming according to a report by British economist Nicholas Stern. It would cost less to take strong action against climate change than to react to changes as they unfold, the study concludes.

The first person to predict man-made global warming was Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius, who published a paper titled On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground in 1896. He continued his research on the effects of carbon dioxide on climate for the next decade and wrote a two-volume textbook on the subject as well as a non-technical book, Worlds in the Making, for a wider audience. Not foreseeing the rapid increase in fossil fuel use during the twentieth century, he predicted that it would take about 3,000 years for significant global warming to take effect! His theories were dismissed by the scientific community. Until about 1960, most scientists considered it implausible that humans could affect global temperatures. In 1903 Arrhenius won the Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on electrolytic theory (unrelated to his global warming theories).