Carbon Emissions, Why bother?

Carbon emissions, the hidden enemy. Carbon emissions are the main greenhouse gas that we hear about. Greenhouse gases, as the name suggests, contribute to the greenhouse effect.

Heat from the sun comes to Earth and some reflects off the atmosphere, the rest of this energy passes through and hits the earth. This energy splits again, some is absorbed by the earth and some is reflected again. This keeps the Earth in a constant cycle of heating up in the day and cooling down at night while the energy is just being given off.

This is where the greenhouse gases come in, the energy being given off from the Earth surface gets reflected again, back to the ground by greenhouse gases, like carbon emissions. This combined with the fact that every day more energy is being absorbed means that the Earth is slowly warming up.

This effect is not to be confused with the hole in the ozone layer, they are 2 separate effects that will eventually lead to the same conclusion, but they must be dealt with separately.

If we don't combat the release of carbon emissions into the atmosphere then the constant slow warming will melt all the ice-caps around the world. A vast quantity of the water on the Earth is in solid form as ice in the ice-caps. As this water is above sea level if it were to melt it would raise the sea level dramatically and could cause major problems to many countries like Denmark which are currently under the sea level as it is. Should global warming continue we stand to lose much of mainland Europe and parts of Australia and Africa to flooding and a lot of our polar wildlife will be left homeless due to the lack of viable habitat, this could lead to a sudden rise in the number of extinct species?

Nature has mechanisms to combat this, by taking carbon back into the carbon cycle via photosynthesis, but these mechanisms aren't effective enough to deal with the scale of problem we have created. The main contributors to these carbon emissions are the burning of fossil fuels for various reasons.

This proves that something must be done to stop global warming by carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect. We c an stop it from occurring at its' source by getting people to think about the carbon they use, or we can invent some way of more efficiently reducing the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In the end you are paying extra most of the time to harm the environment, which is a situation where everybody loses so there really isn't any reason to not at least try to cut your emissions.