The End of The World Part 2: Global Warming
by How will the Earth meet its fate? This twelve-part series endeavors to look at a number of methods that might finish it – and everything still living on it.
In part 2, I delve into the possibilities of global warming to see if we might all meet an uncomfortably unpleasant end as the world continues to get hotter and hotter.
Like it or not, the world is getting hotter. NASA reported that 2009 was tied for the second hottest year in modern records, behind only 2005 on a worldwide level. January 2000-December of 2009 was the warmest decade on record, and there is little evidence showing that these figures will decline.
Most of us have seen The Day After Tomorrow, where the Earth went through a “correction” of powerful storms that locked most of the northern world in ice. Global warming is a process that many climate scientists believe is at least partially caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases which trap incoming heat near the planet’s surface, but it is also quite possibly a partially natural occurrence, where effects from the sun, aerosols, tropical sea surface temperatures, and other factors could play a role.
If this trend continues, the ultimate scenario is checkmate: the world will eventually grow too hot to maintain life, and water will simply evaporate, leaving behind an empty dustbowl. Plant life will dry up and disappear, and the creatures that depend on both water and plants will die off as well – including us, if we’re still here.
Even before that happens, there are many possibilities where Global Warming, if it accelerates, could change the face of the world enough to count as an “end”:
The Rising of the Seas
The polar caps are melting. Large chunks of the Antarctic ice shelf are breaking off and melting every year, and several major shelves at both poles show signs weakening. Just a single collapse of one of these major shelves could cause a significant rise in sea levels, burying coastlines with low sea levels.
Changing of the Food Chains
With changing temperatures and environments comes an ever-changing food-chain to which we are invariably tied at some point. Humans can adjust their diets fairly easily, but as we make our impact on the food chains in every habitat, eventually a bad fate is going to catch up with us: overfishing and polluting the waters, the harvesting of natural resources such as oil, wood, coal, and other minerals, and simple human expansion all takes its toll on an ever-shrinking environment.
Disappearance of the Jungles
You can call them Rain Forests if you want, but to be honest, they’re getting less rain every year, and the rate that they’re being cut down is jaw-dropping. Deforestation continues at accelerated paces in virtually every country where jungles and rain forests exist. According to the FAO, Brazil alone cuts and burns over 3,000,000 hectares of jungle land every year to make way for cattle ranches and small-scale subsistence farming, and the need for more is on.
Chart from mongabay.com using public FAO data.
End of the World?
Sadly, global warming is a very real fate if you believe most climatologists. It doesn’t really matter if we’re to blame for it or not; if we don’t find a way to stop or slow global warming, it will assuredly find a way to stop us eventually.
Don’t stop here! Journey on with me as I continue through the myriad ways the world might end:
The End of the World Part 1: By Natural Disaster
The End of the World Part 2: Global Warming
The End of the World Part 3: Overpopulation
The End of the World Part 4: Pestilence
The End of the World Part 5: Meteor Strike
The End of the World Part 6: Solar Flare
The End of the World Part 7: Nuclear War
The End of the World Part 8: Black Hole
The End of the World Part 9: [The Wrath of] God
The End of the World Part 10: Mad Scientists
The End of the World Part 11: By Prediction
Liked it
