GLOBAL

WARMING
 The globe is heating up. Both land and
oceans are warmer now than they were when
record keeping began, in 1880, and temperatures
are still ticking upward. This rise in heat is
GLOBAL WARMING.
Definitions
• is a term used for the observed century-scale rise in the average
temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related effects.

• is the slow increase in the average temperature of the earth’s

atmosphere because an increased amount of the energy (heat) striking the
earth from the sun is being trapped in the atmosphere and not radiated
out into space.

• is a gradual increase in the earth's temperature generally due to the

greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, CFCs,
and other pollutants.

• is gauged by the increase in the average global temperature of the Earth.

✓ Scientists are more than 95%
certain that nearly all of global
warming is caused by
increasing concentrations
of greenhouse gases (GHGs)
and other human-
caused emissions.

✓ Within the earth's atmosphere,

accumulating greenhouse
gases like water vapor, carbon
dioxide, methane, nitrous
oxide, and ozone are the gases
within the atmosphere that
absorb and emit heat
radiation.

✓ Increasing or decreasing
amounts of greenhouse gases
within the atmosphere act to
either hold in or release more
of the heat from the sun.
✓Global warming can reach levels of irreversibility, and increasing
levels of global warming can eventually reach an extinction level
where humanity and all life on earth will end.

• Irreversible Global Warming - defined as a continuum of increasing

temperature that causes the global climate to rapidly change until
those higher temperatures becomes irreversible on practical human
time scales.

• Extinction level global warming - defined as temperatures exceeding

preindustrial levels by 5-6° Celsius (9-10.8° Fahrenheit) or the
extinction of all planetary life, or the eventual loss of our atmosphere.

• If our atmosphere is also lost, this is referred to as runaway global

warming.
Global warming has presented another issue called
climate change.

➢Climate change refers to changes in weather patterns and

growing seasons around the world. It also refers to sea
level rise caused by the expansion of warmer seas and
melting ice sheets and glaciers.

➢Global warming causes climate change, which poses a

serious threat to life on earth in the forms of widespread
flooding and extreme weather.