Global Warming

All About Global Warming

1)       Global warming is the process when the Earth heats up, and the temperature rises.
2)      Carbon dioxide, water vapour, nitrous oxide and methane are the main greenhouse gases. These greenhouse gases trap heat and light from the Sun in the Earth’s atmosphere; this increases the temperature, and causes global warming.
3)      Since the beginning of the 20^th century, the average temperature of the Earth has risen by 0.8 degree Celsius.
4)      There are two main scales to measure temperature the Celsius scale and the Fahrenheit scale
5)      Meteorology is the science that studies atmospheric phenomena, especially those that relate to weather.
6)      Over 150,000 deaths are caused globally every year, due to frequent heat waves and droughts, increased floods, and more powerful storms-some of the effects of global warming.
7)      According to a report from the World Health Organization published in 2005, climate related deaths will double in the next 25 years.
8)      The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is usually expressed in parts per million, or ppm by weight. At present, the burning of fossil fuels releases 7 billion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere each year, which in turn, will produce 26.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide gas.
9)      The 13 warmest years on record have all occurred in the 15 years since 1997. The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces for March 2012,was the 16^th warmest on record.
10)   Paleoclimatology is a very big name for the study of climate changes that have happened during the entire history of the Earth.
11)   Climate and weather are the two aspects of meteorology.
12)   Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere in a region.  It deals with sunshine, rain, clouds cover, winds, hail, snow, sleet, freezing rain, flooding, blizzards, storms, heat waves and other conditions on a particular day or time.
13)   Climate is how the atmosphere ‘behaves’ over relatively long periods of time
14) Earliest Drought: In 436 BC, thousands of starving Romans drowned themselves in the Tiber river because severe drought had create an acute shortage of food. This was one of the earliest recorded famines brought about by prolonged drought.
15) The Nobel peace Prize 2007 was awarded jointly to Intergovernmental Panelon Climate Change and Albert Arnold Gore Jr. "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change"
16) WMO is the World Meteorological Organization. It was established in 1950 as a specialized Agency of the United Nations Organization. Its role is to study the state and behavior of the Earth's atmosphere,its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces, and the distribution of water resources.Also it deals with all related sciences as well.
17) The first world Climate Change Conference was held in 1979. It was organized by the World Meteorological Organization at Geneva.
18)
Date Significance
22-Mar World Water Day
23-Mar World Meteorological Day
22-Apr International Mother Earth Day
5-Jun World Environment Day
16-Sep International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer


19) There are two main scales to measure temperature - the Celsius scale and the Fahrenheit scale.


20) Did you know that spiders, webs can help us study global warming? This is because they trap droplets of fog, or cloud water. Spider webs are collected by scientists as samples for the study of the changes in the atmosphere.


21) Svante Arrhenius was a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner. He is famous as the father of climate change science.


22) Greenland's glaciers keep shrinking as higher surface temperatures have created record mass losses in 2010 and 2011. The ice lost by just one of its glaciers comes to 20 million tonnes per day.


23) Did you know that volcanoes may sometimes actually reduce global warming? This is because a massive explosion would result in huge amounts of sulfuric acid combining with water vapour to form a shield that reflects sunlight away from the Earth. This may cool the Earth for a year or two, but an explosion of this magnitude could prove disastrous in itself.


24) Water vapour plays an important role in keeping the Earth at a temperature that is friendly to life. Ice and snow on the Earth's surface reflect sunlight, and if there was no water vapour in the atmosphere to trap the heat, the Earth would become too cold to support life.


25) Brown Water: As a result of global warming, temperatures will rise. This will cause more coloured organic matter to run off into lakes. The water in the lakes will become brown. Brown water keeps the sunlight from reaching the bottom of the lake. Algae at the bottom of the lake can't survive without sunlight.

Interesting General Science Questions

• WHY DOES A BIRD NOT GET AN ELECTRIC SHOCK WHEN IT SITS ON A LIVE WIRE?

A bird sitting on a live wire will get a shock only if the electric current passes through its body. We can compare the flow of electricity through a body to the flow of water. Like in a water flow, electric current always flows from a higher potential level to a lower potential level. The two wires in an electric post are kept in different potentials. One wire, which we call live, will be at a high potential, and it is the phase wire. The other wire is neutral and its potential is zero. On sitting on the live wire, the bird’s potential will also be raised to the same potential as the wires. A current will pass through its body from the live wire to the neutral wire. The bird can sit on the live wire without getting electric shock as long as it doesn't touch the neutral wire.

• WHY DO FLOWERS HAVE DIFFERENT COLORS?

Flowers are colorful for one main purpose,survival.Flowers are responsible for the survival of plants from one generation to another.For this,they need the help of insects and birds.It is both the scents and colors which attract insects and birds,which land on the flower to sip its nectar.In doing so,they help to spread the pollen for new flowers.

  

  Flowers get their colors from some chemical dyes in their cells, called pigments.When petals contain enough carotene,they will look yellow,orange, and dark brown. Green petals mainly contain chlorophyll. Petals of white flowers have no pigments,but are full of air bubbles.

• WHY ARE THERE SEVEN DAYS IN A WEEK?

There is no mathematical or astronomical reasons for the number of days in a week,as there is for the number of days or months in a year, which are determined by the movements of sun and moon, respectively.

The Babylonians were the first civilization to have a seven -day week. They created a 7-day a week so they could devote one day a week to worship the seven heavenly bodies that they knew.

Later in history, other cultures had weeks varying in length from 4 to 10 days,depending on the frequency of their markets. In the Book of Genesis, God created the world in six days;on the seventh day he rested.

• WHAT ARE FOSSILS AND THEIR IMPORTANCE?

Fossils are formed when a plant or animal dies and its soft body parts degrade,leaving behind harder parts as leaves, bones, and shells. These are very important to us because fossils provide vital information about the history of the planet.

Fossils provide information about the topography, the climatic conditions,animal culture,habitat and other factors that prevailed during a particular era. Fossils are also important tool in understanding evolutionary processes. They provide real physical evidence for processes that occurred millions of years ago.

• WHY BOTANY AND MEDICINE WERE WELL DEVELOPED IN ANCIENT INDIA?

There is evidence that the people of Ancient India had knowledge of botany and medicine even as far as back as 2500 BC. The Rig Veda tells us about the action of light on plants, and during the vedic period, the medicinal properties of plants were known too. Later, botany evolved into medicine, and the science of agriculture. A document dated about the 6th century BC describes the use of about 960 medicinal plants, and includes information on such topics as anatomy,physiology,pathology and obstetrics. 

Ayurveda developed in India around 1500 BC, and the earliest Ayurvedic treatises was the Sushruta Samhita which is attributed to the great physician Sushruta. He wrote on medicine,Pathology,anatomy,midwifery,ophthalmology,biology and hygiene.

Charak, the great Hindu physician lived around 320 BC. His teachings are compiled into what is known as "Charak Samhita" and it is also one of the classics of ancient Indian Medicine.

• COWS CONTRIBUTION IN GLOBAL WARMING

Agriculture is responsible for an estimated 14% of the world's green house gases. A significant portion of these emissions come from Methane. The world's 1.5 billion cows and billions of other grazing animals emit dozens of polluting gases,including lots of methane. The average dairy cow emits 100 to 200 litres of methane a day.Methane is lighter than air,colorless,odorless - and this is the gas that animals burp out. Methane is also known as Marsh gas. This is because it is produced when plants and other organic matter decompose in the absence of oxygen.

• THE ANCIENT GEOLOGISTS WHO STUDIED THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH?

Al Biruni was one of the earliest geologists, whose works during the Middle Ages included the earliest writings on the geology of India, hypothesizing that the Indian subcontinent was once a sea. Avicenna was a famous Persian who theorized on the formation of mountains, origin of earthquakes, formation of minerals, and the diversity of the Earth’s terrain. William Whiston published ‘A New Theory of the Earth’ in 1696. Later, James Hutton, a Scottish scientist argued that the processes occurring in the Earth today had their counter parts in the ancient past. He is considered the founder of modern geology.

• WHY ROCKS ARE CALLED THE PAGES OF THE EARTH’S HISTORY BOOK?

Almost all the Earth’s history, to the extent that it is recorded, is recorded in rocks. The characteristics that rocks display are related in an orderly fashion to the processes that created the rock. The presence of fossil corals, or the shells of other marine organisms in a limestone indicates that it was deposited on the sea floor, and that what now is land, once lay beneath the waves. Old lava flows represent the eruptions of ancient volcanoes, and vents that were active many millions of years ago. Beds of rock-salt point to the former existence of inland seas that evaporated in the sunshine. Seams of coal, which are the compressed remains of accumulations of peat, suggest widespread swamps and luxuriant vegetation. So, we can say that studying the way the Earth works now furnishes an understanding of the characteristics of rocks and the history they represent.

• WHY IS SEA FLOOR SPREADING?

The sea floor spreading is the movement of two oceanic plates move apart, the rocks break, and form a crack between the plates. Earthquakes occur along the plate boundary. Magma rises through the cracks, and seeps out onto the ocean floor like a long, thin, undersea volcano. As the magma meets the water, it cools and solidifies, adding to the edges of the sideways-moving plates. The magma piles up along the crack, and a long chain of mountains forms gradually on the ocean floor. This chain I s called an oceanic ridge. An example of an oceanic ridge is the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is one part of a system of mid-oceanic ridges that stretches for 80,467 kilometres through the world’s oceans. The underwater mountains of the ridge may be more than three and a quarter kilometres higher than the surrounding sea floor.

• WHY IS THE EGYPTIAN VULTURE CONSIDERED TO BE VERY INTELLIGENT?

The Egyptian vulture is the smallest of all the European vultures. This white and black raptor with a naked yellow face is found In Southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and India. Among the natural habitats favoured by the Egyptian vulture are plains, wetlands, uplands, and mountains. Egyptian vultures are specialists in egg-eating. They are among the only known birds in the world to use stones as tools. They will repeatedly strike at an abandoned ostrich egg with stones, and then use their beak to enlarge the hole and penetrate the membrane. This behavior is not instinctive, but learned from other vultures, as the species is very intelligent.

• WHAT IS A NUCLEAR WINTER?

Nuclear winter is a term that describes the climatic effects of nuclear war. If a nuclear bomb is dropped, the sky will blaze with the radiance of a thousand suns. Millions of living things will be burnt to ash. Finally, as nuclear firestorms set cities and forests ablaze, torrents of smoke will ascend into the atmosphere to entomb the planet in billowing, black clouds of ash.Because sunlight would not able to reach Earth, global temperatures would drop dramatically, and our ability to produce food would be greatly reduced. The result will be noontime darkness,plummeting temperatures, crop failures, food scarcity and the eventual death of life on planet Earth.

• WHICH ARE THE DIFFERENT LAYERS OF THE ATMOSPHERE?

 The Earth's atmosphere can be divided into several layers. These layers are divided based on the characteristics of the gases found at that height.

  The first layer of the atmosphere is called the troposphere. The troposphere is the layer that we live in, and where weather occurs.

 The next layer of our atmosphere is called the stratosphere. Above the stratosphere lies the mesosphere. Above the mesosphere is the thermosphere. Extending from the top of the thermosphere to 10,000 KM above the Earth, is the exosphere. The troposphere is known as the lower atmosphere. The stratosphere and the mesosphere form the middle atmosphere, and the thermosphere is the upper atmosphere.

• WHY DO WE SAY THAT THE SUN DRIVES THE EARTH'S WEATHER SYSTEM?

The Sun is the driving force behind weather. As solar energy reaches the Earth, equatorial regions heat up more than the poles. As land or ocean water warms, it heats the air next to it, and this air begins rising. The heated air rises, and cooler air from else where flows into replace it. At the same time, the Earth's rotation causes the air to begin turning, as it flows along the ground, or high in the air. The result is a complicated picture with storms and winds carrying cool air towards the tropics, and warm air toward the poles. It is the unequal distribution of solar energy on the planet that caused temperature variations, which in turn, cause the wind and weather.

Science Discoveries

1.      1700’s The origin of modern scientific disciplines.

2.        1752 Benjamin Franklin proposes the single fluid theory of electricity.
3.       1800 Alessandro Volta invents chemical batteries and voltage.
4.       1820 Hans Christan Orsted notices that electric current deflects a magnetized needle.
5.       1821 Michael Faraday shows that changing magnetic field produces electricity.
6.       1840 James Joule and Hermann Von Helmholtz propose that electricity is a form of energy.
7.       1873 James Maxwell presents equations of electromagnetism.
8.       1887 Heinrich Hertz transmits radio waves.
9.       1895 Wilhelm Roentgen discovers X-rays.
10.   1896 Henry Becquerel discovered Radioactivity.
11.   1897 J.J.Thomson discovers the electron.
12.   1898 Pierre and Marie Curie separate radioactive elements.
13.   1900 Max Planck invents the quantum theory of radiation.
14.   1905 Albert Einstein formulate the theory of relativity.
15.   1913 Niels Bohr applies Planck’s theory to the atomic structure.
16.   1923 Erwin Schrodinger’s wave equation.
17.   1927 Max Born and Werner Heisenberg formulate matrix mechanics.
18.   1949 Richard Feynman, Julian Schwinger, and Shin’ichiro Tomonaga formulate quantum electrodynamics.
19.   1967 Steven Weinberg, Sheldon Glashow and Abdus Salam’s formulate unified theory of electromagnetic and weak forces.
20.   1964 Superfluid helium-3 discovered by David Lee.
21.   1986 Discovery of high-temperature superconductivity by Karl Muller and J.Bednorz.