Speech on Global Warming

1. Global warming was once an uncommon term used by a few scientists who were concerned about the decades of pollution affecting long-term weather patterns.

2. Good morning/afternoon whatever your teachers name is and fellow classmates. Today the idea of global warming is well known, but not many people understand it.

3. It is not unusual to hear someone complaining about a hot day or a freak storm and remark, “its global warming”. Well, is it? Although there has been a scientific consensus on global warming, some aren’t sure it’s something we need to worry about.

4. The term global warming refers to a significant increase in the earth’s climatic temperature over a relatively short period of time. In specific terms, an increase of 1 or more degrees Celsius in a time span of one or two hundred years would be considered global warming.

5. Global warming is caused by an increase in the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect is not a bad thing by itself- it is what allows the earth to stay warm enough for life to survive.

6. What would the earth look like if there wasn’t a greenhouse effect? It would probably look a lot like Mars. Mars doesn’t have a thick enough atmosphere to reflect enough heat back to the planet, so it has weather extremes. The greenhouse effect happens because of certain naturally occurring substances in the atmosphere.

7. Think of the earth sort of like your car sitting out in the parking lot on a hot sunny day. Your car is always warmer than the outside temperature if it’s been sitting there for a while. The suns rays enter through your cars windows. Some of the heat is absorbed by the seats, the dashboard and the floor.

8. When those objects release this heat, it doesn’t all get back out; some is reflected back in. So a certain amount of energy is going in, and less is going out. The result is a gradual increase in temperature inside your car.

9. That is the basic idea but of course global warming is a bit more complicated.

10. We can see the effects of global warming everywhere, even in unpopulated and isolated places around the globe. Ice caps and glaciers are melting causing less of the sun’s energy to be reflected back out of the earth. This would cause ocean levels to rise, causing flooding in low lying areas and islands.

11. With an overall rise of temperature and increase in sea levels, ocean-borne storms such as hurricanes and tropical storms would increase in force as they go over warmer and higher waters.

12. So is global warming a real problem? Many scientists say it is but some say we have nothing to worry about because they think that data is not being interpreted correctly, some believe that the increase in global temperatures are a natural climatic shift.

13. So, now that I’ve told you about what global warming is, you make the decision; man made or natural phenomenon.

Sources: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.htmlhttp://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/sciencetech/5-deadliest-effects-of-global-warming/276http://epa.gov/climatechange/kids/gw.htmlhttp://science.howstuffworks.com/global-warming.htm