Climatic Fluctuations

Paper Summary:

This paper relates that historians and archaeologists can trace numerous events to smaller climatic fluctuations, such as Europe's "Little Ice Age," which happened in the early Middle Ages bringing strange weather that caused famines, uprisings and withdrawal of northern Icelandic and Greenland colonies. The author points out that some people believe that the major threat to humanity is not diseases, crazed terrorist or the earth being bombarded by asteroids but rather world population growth. Environmental experts are concerned over how many people the earth's atmosphere can support. The paper stresses that a scientific consensus says the most direct result of the many gas emissions is a "global warming" of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees over the next millennium, and that is in addition to a more than evident temperature increase of half a degree.

From the Paper:

"The Maldives, a chain of 1,180 islands in the Indian Ocean now sits three feet above the ocean's surface. In his Los Angeles Times article, "Maldives Faces Global Warming Goliath," writer Dexter Filkins says that "the entire nation could vanish, Atlantis-like, into the sea." Last winter, these island states crusaded for marked reductions in global greenhouse gases. While the US has proposed that industrialized nations began to reduce emissions in 2008 (at 1990 levels), the 35 nations Alliance of Small Island States insists on a 20 % cutback by 2005. While the exact danger (and its arrival) is unknown, island countries are anxious about a five-year study by the International Panel of Climate Change that predicts that by 2100, sea levels could rise from 6 inches to 3 feet. If such a dire forecast comes true, the ocean will swallow most of the Maldives. The country's main economic activity, tourism, would be devastated."

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• Analytical Essay # 141296 : "Is Climate Change A Reality?"
• Term Paper # 14498 : "Extinction Of The Dinosaurs"

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