Aquecimento global

rafael rodrigues
Joaquim fernandes
ENGL 1101
02/24/2012
Global warming -- a serious warning I have a dream, that in a near future, the people of this world will come together as one. We could all come together as one and leave all our differences of color, religion, and political views behind us, to stand together to face what Bill McKibben calls the greatest challenge and threat mankind has ever faced: global warming. In 2007 Bill McKibben, an author, educator, and environmentalist, wrote the article, “Global Warning: Get Up! Stand Up!” to persuade people that we, the people on earth, have caused, and are still causing, the climate changes that have been taking place over the past decades. More than that, however, McKibben explains that something still needs to be done about it. McKibben uses extreme, yet reasonable, examples and methods to convey this message effectively. Global warming is the result of the greenhouse effect, which has increased since the human race started to burn fossil fuels in order to extract energy. When fossil fuels are being burnt, greenhouse gasses, such as carbon dioxide, set free into the atmosphere. The accumulative pollution causes the atmosphere to reflect heat radiation back towards the earth, instead of letting the gasses disappear into space, because the ozone layer gets thicker. However, without the greenhouse effect, our planet “would be 33 degrees Celsius cooler“ (“McKibben” 4). Since the carbon dioxide has already increased by one third in the atmosphere since the nineteenth century, the effect will be stronger and therefore more heat will be kept inside the atmosphere than before. This phenomenon, called global warming, leads to a hotter climate; as a matter of fact, the earth is today hotter than it has been in over 2000 years (“McKibben” 5-9). Warming - that word almost sounds inviting, like we all might live in a world twenty years from, that could be a tropical paradise where the extent of our problems would