Recent Heat Wave

Posted by Katharine M. J. Osborne Aug 5, 2006

The answer is, not necessarily. It's not unusual to have this type of fluctuation in the weather. In fact, where I live in Arizona, temperatures have been unusually cool for this time of year - in the the 90s (30s Celsius) as opposed to the 110s (40s Celsius), with a lot of cloudy days - which are almost unheard of in the summer.

People are asking themselves about global warming because it is a topic that has finally sunk into the popular consciousness, with the release of Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth". While scientists have known global warming to be a solid scientific fact for the last decade or so, the popular opinion of global warming is that it was still being debated as actually happening. Now that popular opinion has caught up to fact, people are quick to assign blame for any unusual weather to global warming.

Global warming is a gradual trend that has been developing rather slowly over the past two centuries or so. It is the artificial warming of the Earth due to human factors, primarily the burning of carbon rich fuels which increases the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and acts like a blanket insulating the the surface of the Earth by trapping heat from the Sun. The effects of burning carbon rich fuels are compounded by mass deforestation - forests act as a regulator by locking up excess carbon in the atmosphere. Within the next 100 years, if nothing is done to prevent it, global warming will produce a runaway greenhouse effect, where the warming trend shifts from gradual to rapid, and the planet will become uninhabitable to most forms of life.

This is a dire forecast, but it is preventable through the reduction of fossil fuel consumption and reforestation among other tactics. We just have to remember that the Earth is a relatively closed physical system - for the most part, what happens on Earth stays on Earth.