Critically access the scientific evidence for global warming and explain using selected examples how its impacts could produce problems and benefits for human activities and land uses.

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Critically access the scientific evidence for global warming and explain using selected examples how its impacts could produce problems and benefits for human activities and land uses.

Global warming as it states in its title is a global phenomenon which has global implications. Present day situations are not at any levels to cause major change in the global scale of things but localised problems are becoming apparent and causing a global investigation into the causes and possible future effects of global warming. The scientific predictions available paint a bleak picture and without immediate intervention into the causes of global warming the impacts on all areas of human society will soon become apparent. In this essay I am going to access the evidence available on global warming and how this evidence leads to the impacts that will affect human land use and activities.

The greenhouse effect is the way the earth is warmed in the day by the incoming rays from the sun and cooled at night by inferred waves leaving the earth. These cause a balance and result in our current temperatures. The incoming rays pass easily through the atmosphere which is made up of mainly nitrogen and oxygen but some of the out going radiation is trapped by the remaining trace gases. These trap the heat as a greenhouse does hence they're named green house gases. These natural gases maintain the temperature if they did not exist then the earth would be over 33 degrees cool far to cold to maintain life. These natural green house gases are made up mostly of water but they also contain small amounts of carbon dioxide methane, nitrous oxide and ozone. During the past few years the green house gases have been monitored and their levels have been rising in all cases except water which has remained constant. These rises in concentrations can be attributed to the increase in world population and the growth of agriculture and industry linked to this growth. This increase of gases is allowing the atmosphere a greater ability to trap heat. This therefore has led scientist to attribute increasing green house gases as the cause for global warming. Already there has been an increase in world temperatures by around 0.5 degrees and predictions suggest that by 2100 temperatures could have risen by anywhere between 1.5 and 4.5 degrees.
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Although all scientists now agree that global warming is taking place there is disagreement as how the data collected and predictions made from this information is going to effect world climate and consequently how a change in climate will affect land use and human activity.

One Idea is as the atmosphere gets warmer then so too will the water in the world oceans. As the sea water warms up it will expand this will cause a eustatic rise in its level by between 0.25 and 1 meter by 2100, this rise alone would submerge low lying coral ...

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