Global Warming Effects – Should We Be Concerned About Them?

While we may still be arguing about whose fault it is that planet Earth is so environmentally degraded, two interesting questions nonetheless arise:

• If the change of the climate and temperature is purely a natural process (which, assumingly, takes many hundreds and thousands of years), why did we witness such an unusually high increase in the global temperature just over the last several decades?
• Whatever the cause of this issue is, do we accept that the increased average global temperature is a big problem and do we actually need to be concerned about global warming effects?

Just take a look at some effects of global warming below:

Changes in Climate Patterns

Among the most serious problems here are:

• droughts and floods which especially affect less developed nations of the world, and
• other extreme weather events such as heat waves, extreme winter cold and cyclones.

Perhaps only experts know that the conflict in Darfur was preceded by years of severe drought and desertification (most likely caused by global warming). This situation forced people from one area of the country to travel to another and fight for scarce water resources.

Changes in Global Sea Level

One prediction by climate scientists that makes me feel really worried is that only a 2°C increase in the global temperature would lead to a complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

This would cause the global sea level to rise by 5 – 6 meters and eventually would submerge many islands and low-lying regions around the planet.

If you thought that was scary, think about this:

If we were to lose the West Antarctic ice sheet, this would bring the sea levels up by another 10.5 meters.

Effects on Biodiversity and Animals

It has long been suspected that global warming may have particularly negative effects on animals, especially vulnerable ones such as frogs.

There are predictions that animal extinction rates will be moving up alongside the temperature increases.

Effects on Humans

Apart from direct destruction of human habitats by global warming events such as floods, the gradual impacts of global warming on the human-well being will be mostly three-fold:

• water supplies
• food supplies, and
• human health

The global water resources may be under huge stress as a result of global warming.

Food supplies may be affected both by the shortage of water as well as droughts and floods.

As for the human health, it may deteriorate as a result of water and food shortages as well as directly by global warming events such as heat waves.

And those are just several obvious effects of global warming.

The question still remains: Should we, or shouldn’t we, do something about it?

For more information, please see our detailed analysis of global warming effects here.