Global Warming

The book I read to research this post was Global Warming A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is around 150 pages but is a good introduction to the subject. 800 million people go to bed hungry every night and as well as the challenge of Global Warming this is interlocked with Global Poverty. The Chinese are bringing a new power station online every 4 days and almost all developing countries are rapidly becoming industrialized. With this industrialization they are using coal and oil technologies which may represent a nightmare scenario of Global Warming going from bad to worse. If there was no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the Earth’s temperature would be at least 35 degrees centigrade less so it does a valuable job.However if there is too much carbon dioxide it threatens to start a pattern of the Earth continually warming up and nobodies how far it’s liable to go. There is ocean currents in the Gulf Stream which ensure Europe has relatively mild weather and these currents could change course causing Europe to have more extreme weather. There are huge amounts of carbon dioxide locked up in the oceans but this is readily transferable to the atmosphere. At one time scientists thought the oceans would absorb any excess carbon dioxide and thought that would solve the problem. There are huge amounts of methane frozen on the seabed of deep oceans that can be released as the oceans warm up causing tsunamis & increasing global warming still further. At the moment the countries on the Pacific Rim are quite prepared for tsunamis but if methane is released almost anywhere with an ocean is at risk.