Earth Day 2007 - A One Planet Life - Dominica Island Blog: Sharing Every Dominican Moment with the World

22 Apr 2007

Earth Day 2007 - A One Planet Life

I’m not a climate expert. But I do know that we share this beautiful planet called Earth. And we should do everything in our power to save our planet, because it’s the only one we got. If we don’t who will? You can get all the facts you need off the web and double –check then in several citations, in less than an hour of searching!

One Facet Of Human Activity- The Automobile
The first gasoline-powered engine was developed in Germany in 1885 or 1886; the first automobile manufacturing company was set up in the United States in 1893. Henry Ford opened Ford Motor Company in 1903, and began mass-production thereafter. This means that humans were introducing virtually no carbon dioxide into the atmosphere via automobile before around 1900. After some more research I found out that there are now about 700 million motor vehicles in the world, and rising.

Global population in 1900 was about 1.65 billion people. Now it’s about 6.5 billion people, consuming energy and emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as the byproduct. Not to mention all the space now taken up by buildings, roads, parking lots, etc. Which was once occupied by vegetation that converted carbon dioxide to oxygen.

I learned in school, long before global warning was a hot topic, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it lets sunlight in but block some of infrared radiation’s return of energy back out of our atmosphere to space. Through this greenhouse effect, if carbon dioxide increases, there should be more energy stored in the earth system (atmosphere, oceans, and land). With more energy available, the byproduct of all that extra energy would cause warming of the earth system, along wit melting of ice caps and other effects.

Source:FreeRangeStudios