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Environmental Changes Around Us

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Submitted By jampong
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Environmental Changes Around Us

Our parents, grandparents kept telling us that the environment was quite a clean and green place to live in back in the days, they used to tell us many different stories of how they enjoyed taking baths in the Pasig River, standing by at the breathtaking view of the Manila Bay, and stargazing during the cold night. Have you ever wondered what happened? Why is it that we have never experienced that kind of living in this generation? Metropolitan Manila has become too hot, the streets have become flood-prone, climate change has worsened, and many typhoons have intensified further through the years. Change is the only thing permanent in this world, but for this situation, it is turning for the worst. These events are caused by global warming, or the heating up of the Earth’s atmosphere, a phenomenon we cannot just neglect.

Oxford Dictionary defines global warming as “A gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth’s atmosphere generally attributed to the greenhouse effect caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants.” The discovery and naming of this phenomenon is led by a Swedish scientist names Svante Arrhenius in the year 1896. He claimed that, “Fossil fuel combustion may eventually result in enhanced global warming. He proposed a relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and temperature. He found that the average surface temperature of the earth is about fifteen degrees Celsius because of the infrared absorption capacity of water vapor and carbon dioxide. This is called the natural greenhouse effect. Arrhenius suggested a doubling of the carbon dioxide concentration would lead to a five degrees Celsius temperature rise. He and Thomas Chamberlin calculated that human activities could warm the earth by adding carbon dioxide to the

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