Global Climate Change?

What is climate change? After hearing this word, we normally come up with the word global warming which refers to the increase of the earth’s temperature due to an over amount of greenhouse gases formed by some harmful substances such carbon dioxide, methane gas, and nitrous oxide. Today, we, human beings, are facing the fact that the earth is becoming warmer and warmer and climate is changing. Up to this point, there have been a lot of hot discussions about this controversial issue. The main topic is whether climate change exists due to the natural factor or human factors. Mainly, I will put forward a number of reasons for claiming that climate change is caused by human activities.

First, it is asserted that deforestation is one of the main causes of climate change. It is quite clear that the needs for spaces and facilities surely increase when the size of population grows larger and larger. People tend to cut down forests for living space and building of infrastructures in order to arise their living standard. Apart from this, food production certainly needs increasing in order to support the large number of people. To enrich crop yields, people will clear forests to get more spaces for growing crops. Consequently, forest is almost completely depleted. The fewer trees remain, the more carbon dioxide (CO2) is not converted to oxygen (O2), so more and more carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere and forms greenhouse gases, which trap more and more heat on the earth. As a result, the earth’s temperature becomes hotter and hotter.

Another reason in favor of man-made climate change is agricultural practice. It is found that rice production produces a remarkable amount of methane (CH4), a natural gas forming greenhouse gases. When both organic and chemical fertilizers decay in the soil and water without oxygen, the bacteria will generate methane. Doubtlessly, rice is the main food for half of the world population; therefore, a very large amount of rice is produced each year. This also means that a lot of methane is released to the atmosphere every year. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), it is stated that the 18 percent of the release of greenhouse gases comes from agricultural activities.

The third and the most important reason is the industrial revolution. Since the late 18th century, people have been burning fossil fuel such coal, oil and gas for energy in order to run all kinds of machines in industries, factories, vehicles and some other equipment. Undeniably, burning fossil fuel emits a lot of harmful chemical substances, especially carbon dioxide. The important issue is that the consumption of fossil fuel keeps increasing every day, which also means that carbon dioxide is released in a very large amount from day to day. This extremely increases the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. According to Torfaen County Borough Council's research, about 6.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere each year on account of burning fossil fuel. This explains that human activities severely cause global warming.

It has been argued that climate change is natural because the warmer period of the earth came around hundreds years before the rise in carbon dioxide levels. This argument is partly true on the surface. However, as previously stated, human activities, including deforestation, agriculture practices and consumption of fossil fuel, produce far much larger amount of carbon dioxide. This shows that greenhouse gases increase sharply. Unlike this, change in temperature caused by nature increases very slightly and takes a very long time to be noticed. Confidently, it is evident that human activities are the major causes of climate change.

To simply put, we assume that global climate change is not natural, but definitely mad-made owing to the three foremost reasons mentioned above, namely deforestation, agricultural activities and industrial revolution. Personally, whether directly or in directly, we, human beings, should put as much effort as we can on protecting and solving this hot issue for the good of our earth. It has always been said that “to save the earth, to save our lives.”