Wednesday, September 06, 2006
MALLORY'S BLOG POST
Could you live without driving your car everywhere, perhaps you could carpool? Would you give up some time just to plant a tree? Or would you change your light bulbs if you thought it would make a difference? These are just a few of the questions that are being asked to help with our issue of global warming. Global warming is drastically effecting our environment and causing extreme heat waves, air pollution, and storms to become more common around the world. No one can point fingers at anyone else because we are all to blame here but this also means we all can better our situation.
In the past fifty years global warming has gotten radically worse. We have all experienced that tortuous heat. In Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, he stated that the past 14 years have withheld the top ten hottest summers and are only getting hotter. In 2003, Europe faced their hottest summer where the temperatures reached to104.4. This hot summer caused many people to suffer irreversible brain damage, dehydration, heat stroke, and caused 27,000 deaths. Not only has the heat been dreadful, but our air is much dirtier because of our increasing carbon emission per person.
Hurricanes and tornados have gotten tremendously worse because of all the shifts of our temperatures throughout the world. The website www.fightglobalwarming.com has found that, “Between 1961 and 1997, for instance, about 890 cubic miles of ice has been lost. That means that melting glacier ice has added approximately 980 trillion (or 979,994,261,211,428.5) gallons of water to the oceans. That would be like dumping more than a million Olympic-sized swimming pools into our oceans.” This is an example of what the heat is doing to the artic ice around us, it’s all beginning to melt.
Now that we know what is happening because of global warming, maybe we can try to find a way to help prevent it. In the article from the Washington Post, Blaine Harden is discussing the problem of global warming by using a big industrious city as an example. Harden is discussing the issue about planting more trees to relieve some of the heat and air pollution in Sacramento. Sacramento Municipal Utility District is an organization which gives out free trees to whoever would like them because this city believes that trees will help prevent global warming. Recent research shows that by planting trees, you can lower the summer heat which then reduces our air-conditioning bills by 30 percent in hot, dry cities like Sacramento. Trees also catch greenhouse gases which are responsible for our global warming crisis. Deborah Gangloff, Sacramento Municipal Utility District executive director stated “In the two dozen cities we have studied, we have noticed about 25 percent decline in tree canopy cover over the past 30 years. This is a dramatic trend that is costing the cities billions of dollars.” Our government says that trees are priority but yet the Urban and Community Forestry Programs has declined. Annual spending on the program was around 36 million dollars and declined to 27 million dollars in the following year. Before air conditioning became standard in all houses and cars we had to rely on other ways to keep cool, such as planting trees. Trees that have already been planted and that have reached a peak in maturity in the Los Angeles area are expected to conserve enough electricity to give power to about 14,000 homes. After research by the Department of Energy, they calculated that in Los Angeles if people planted 10 million trees, lightened the color pavement and their roofs they could lower the peak summer heat by five degrees, lower air conditioning costs by 18 percent, and reduce air pollution by 12 percent. Now we see what a big effect trees have on our environment and what we can do to help.
Global warming is not a new issue in our world but its arising now as a bigger problem more and more each day. I believe that not just one person or a group of people are to blame for this rising catastrophe. It happens a little bit more everyday and we just need to know what things we can do to slow this process down. Global warming effects us all in many ways, it affects our health, weather, economy, and basically everything. I first got very concerned about global warming when I found out how much my family’s electricity bill was. Our bills normal run around 400 to 500 dollars but this summer it was 700 dollars and sometimes more. This is an outrageous price to pay for our air conditioning. But at the same token it is a necessary evil because without air conditioning the summer heat, caused by global warming, would be unbearable. So when Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, I went to see it. Now I don’t like some of Al Gore’s views but he was bringing up logical points, graphs, and statistics that began to make a lot of sense. His graphs were dated back from the ice age to today and it showed that it has slowly been rising to hotter temperatures. With the way his graphs were going by 2056 average temperatures will exceed 100 degrees. So if we thought this summer was hot, the worst is still yet to come. Well this scares me and made me want to see what I could do to help.
Now not just one person can save the world from global warming but if everyone did a little something it would make a big difference. I went to www.fightglobalwarming.com and found that I could “calculate my impact”, I suggest you all try it and see how bad/good your carbon emission is. This website mentioned a lot of ways you could cut back. For example, when your driving in your car you could go the spend limit because by going just five miles over causes an average fuel economy loss of six percent. Or you could purchase a better bulb such as a Compact fluorescent light (CFLs). They give off high-quality light using a fraction of the electricity. If every household changed three 60-watt incandescent bulbs to CFLS, pollution would be reduce as if 3.5 million cars were taken off the road. I did not mean to lecture, I just wanted to bring this to your attention and everyone can do a little something that would make a big different for us all. I would suggest that in your spare time to go to www.fightglobalwarming.com to see the effect global warming has on you.
Could you live without driving your car everywhere, perhaps you could carpool? Would you give up some time just to plant a tree? Or would you change your light bulbs if you thought it would make a difference? These are just a few of the questions that are being asked to help with our issue of global warming. Global warming is drastically effecting our environment and causing extreme heat waves, air pollution, and storms to become more common around the world. No one can point fingers at anyone else because we are all to blame here but this also means we all can better our situation.
In the past fifty years global warming has gotten radically worse. We have all experienced that tortuous heat. In Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, he stated that the past 14 years have withheld the top ten hottest summers and are only getting hotter. In 2003, Europe faced their hottest summer where the temperatures reached to104.4. This hot summer caused many people to suffer irreversible brain damage, dehydration, heat stroke, and caused 27,000 deaths. Not only has the heat been dreadful, but our air is much dirtier because of our increasing carbon emission per person.
Hurricanes and tornados have gotten tremendously worse because of all the shifts of our temperatures throughout the world. The website www.fightglobalwarming.com has found that, “Between 1961 and 1997, for instance, about 890 cubic miles of ice has been lost. That means that melting glacier ice has added approximately 980 trillion (or 979,994,261,211,428.5) gallons of water to the oceans. That would be like dumping more than a million Olympic-sized swimming pools into our oceans.” This is an example of what the heat is doing to the artic ice around us, it’s all beginning to melt.
Now that we know what is happening because of global warming, maybe we can try to find a way to help prevent it. In the article from the Washington Post, Blaine Harden is discussing the problem of global warming by using a big industrious city as an example. Harden is discussing the issue about planting more trees to relieve some of the heat and air pollution in Sacramento. Sacramento Municipal Utility District is an organization which gives out free trees to whoever would like them because this city believes that trees will help prevent global warming. Recent research shows that by planting trees, you can lower the summer heat which then reduces our air-conditioning bills by 30 percent in hot, dry cities like Sacramento. Trees also catch greenhouse gases which are responsible for our global warming crisis. Deborah Gangloff, Sacramento Municipal Utility District executive director stated “In the two dozen cities we have studied, we have noticed about 25 percent decline in tree canopy cover over the past 30 years. This is a dramatic trend that is costing the cities billions of dollars.” Our government says that trees are priority but yet the Urban and Community Forestry Programs has declined. Annual spending on the program was around 36 million dollars and declined to 27 million dollars in the following year. Before air conditioning became standard in all houses and cars we had to rely on other ways to keep cool, such as planting trees. Trees that have already been planted and that have reached a peak in maturity in the Los Angeles area are expected to conserve enough electricity to give power to about 14,000 homes. After research by the Department of Energy, they calculated that in Los Angeles if people planted 10 million trees, lightened the color pavement and their roofs they could lower the peak summer heat by five degrees, lower air conditioning costs by 18 percent, and reduce air pollution by 12 percent. Now we see what a big effect trees have on our environment and what we can do to help.
Global warming is not a new issue in our world but its arising now as a bigger problem more and more each day. I believe that not just one person or a group of people are to blame for this rising catastrophe. It happens a little bit more everyday and we just need to know what things we can do to slow this process down. Global warming effects us all in many ways, it affects our health, weather, economy, and basically everything. I first got very concerned about global warming when I found out how much my family’s electricity bill was. Our bills normal run around 400 to 500 dollars but this summer it was 700 dollars and sometimes more. This is an outrageous price to pay for our air conditioning. But at the same token it is a necessary evil because without air conditioning the summer heat, caused by global warming, would be unbearable. So when Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth came out, I went to see it. Now I don’t like some of Al Gore’s views but he was bringing up logical points, graphs, and statistics that began to make a lot of sense. His graphs were dated back from the ice age to today and it showed that it has slowly been rising to hotter temperatures. With the way his graphs were going by 2056 average temperatures will exceed 100 degrees. So if we thought this summer was hot, the worst is still yet to come. Well this scares me and made me want to see what I could do to help.
Now not just one person can save the world from global warming but if everyone did a little something it would make a big difference. I went to www.fightglobalwarming.com and found that I could “calculate my impact”, I suggest you all try it and see how bad/good your carbon emission is. This website mentioned a lot of ways you could cut back. For example, when your driving in your car you could go the spend limit because by going just five miles over causes an average fuel economy loss of six percent. Or you could purchase a better bulb such as a Compact fluorescent light (CFLs). They give off high-quality light using a fraction of the electricity. If every household changed three 60-watt incandescent bulbs to CFLS, pollution would be reduce as if 3.5 million cars were taken off the road. I did not mean to lecture, I just wanted to bring this to your attention and everyone can do a little something that would make a big different for us all. I would suggest that in your spare time to go to www.fightglobalwarming.com to see the effect global warming has on you.
