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Jeha, Colton: Global Warming & Your Carbon Footprint

  • Page ID
    95449
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    Individual Essay Submission     

    Cut and paste your un-plagiarized essay of 250-500 words having 3 or more paragraphs into this private individual page below on or before midnight December 1st.  Be sure to save your drafts off line and cut and paste the final version. Submissions will not be accepted after that time.

    Once you have made a final submission, send Dr. R. an e-mail (rrusay@chemconnections.org) advising him that you have done so.

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    Global warming is affecting this planet in many ways and humanity is the cause of it. We as a society can fix this if everyone contributes but that would be near impossible. But soon we will all have too we better change now.

    The Earth has greenhouse gasses in its atmosphere that holds some of the warmth that was provided by the sun and it also reflex some of it back into space. There are many greenhouse gases that protect us. The most important ones are carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. These greenhouse gases can also cause global warming when they are at a certain concentration in our atmosphere. Our current carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere is about 400 parts per million and that is badly high for the Earth's environment. Since the 1950’s the rate of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is just dramatically increasing and still is. Before the 1950’s the rate of carbon dioxide would increase and decrease but after the 1950’s it is increasing and not slowing down. Humans are causing this dramatic increase because of how many vehicles we have on the roads and how much fuel we use daily. It is too much for the environment. Fossil fuels release way too much carbon dioxide to the environment because we are burning so much daily. Solar energy doesn’t release and harmful waste and is a perfect alternative to fossil fuels but of course it is hard and expensive to do so. People are also trying to develop cars that run off of hydrogen instead of fossil fuels. Carbon Dioxide is affecting the oceans and sea life. There is so much carbon dioxide in the air that the ocean has been absorbing it which lowers the oceans pH to make it acidic. When the ocean becomes more acidic, the sea life will slower start to die off. Carbon Dioxide makes the ocean more acidic because when the ocean absorbs the CO2 the minerals in the water gets destroyed by the chemical reaction that occurs because of the CO2.The overall concern to the carbon cycle’s CO2 equilibrium is that the oceans will become too acidic for sea life and we will, at one point, have a lifeless ocean.

    Personally most of my portion of carbon that gets released to the environment is from driving. I go thru 15 gallons of gasoline every one and half weeks. I drive at least an hour a day.  I try to help that though by carpooling with one of my older brothers. My home energy, I mostly could help by shutting of my computer when i'm not using it because my computer is built for gaming and uses a tone of power along with my five siblings and their technology along with my dad and stepmom. Food wise I don’t eat much and if I do eat more than normal it's on a rare occassion. Like everyone else I try to recycle but I don’t stress about it and I have probably thrown many recyclables away by not noticing, not caring or there is no recycling bin near by. I could help this by stressing about recycling.

    Global warming is not a myth and it is only getting worse. We need to change now and try to fix the damage we have done to the environment.

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    Jeha, Colton: Global Warming & Your Carbon Footprint is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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