Environmental Science Assignment: Global Warming Documentary Analysis

This assignment analyzes the documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth', focusing on global warming and its effects. It identifies the film's topic and discusses the four spheres of Earth, highlighting human impact, particularly on the atmosphere. The assignment explains the greenhouse effect, detailing its causes like industrial waste, deforestation, and fossil fuel burning, and also explains the causes of annual downturns in carbon dioxide production. It describes how scientists, including Lonnie Thompson, measure past CO2 and O2 levels using core drills and ice core samples. The assignment details the 10 hottest years, and other weather phenomena, and discusses the effects of global warming, particularly in the poles, and the factors affecting ocean currents and sea levels. It also covers ocean acidification, soil moisture reduction, and melting permafrost, and the solutions, while emphasizing the ozone layer progress. The assignment concludes by highlighting the implications of rising ocean temperatures and the need for various technologies to combat global warming.

Running head: NATURAL DISASTER
Natural Disaster
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1NATURAL DISASTER
1. The film’s topic is ‘Global Warming’.
2. Biosphere, Lithosphere Hydrosphere and Atmosphere are the four spheres of earth.
Atmosphere has is the most affected sphere by the humans.
3. Greenhouse effect is caused due to a number of reasons and they are: industrial landfills and
waste, farming, increase in pollution, deforestation, burning of fossil fuels. Burning of the fossil
fuels like the natural gas, oil, coal has become an integral part of life. These non-renewable
sources of energies are used to produce electricity for transportation. A large amount of carbon
dioxide is generated when these fossil fuels are burnt. Forests are the major green areas on our
planet earth and is considered as a sink for the carbon dioxide. Trees and the plants take in
carbon dioxide take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen through the process of photosynthesis.
However, due to the large-scale development process, a large number of trees and forests are cut
down which has reduced the potential areas of the carbon sink. The increase in population has
led to the rise in the demand for the shelter, cloth and food. The opening of the new
manufacturing hubs in the towns and the cities has led to the increase in the harmful gases in the
atmosphere. Farming on the other hands contributed to extensive usage of nitrous oxide as a
fertilizer and this negatively contributed to the rise in the greenhouse gas.
4. Annual downturn in the production of the carbon dioxide is caused due to the turning of the
Northern Hemisphere towards the sun during the summer and the spring season. This results in
to the vegetation that are in the northern continent result into a full bloom and the plants absorb
more carbon dioxide and creates more oxygen.

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5. In order to measure past the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen, Lonnie has used the core
drills. Lonnie and his colleagues measured the different isotopes of oxygen and determined the
temperature of the gas bubbles that are trapped inside the snow.
6. The samples from the core mountain glaciers can measure both the temperature and the carbon
dioxide levels of the last thousands of years.
7. Using this technique they can go back to 1000 years. The techniques that have been used by
the scientists is by calculating the annular rings. These annular rings are similar to the annular
rings seen inside the tree trunks after they are cut cross-sectionally. The similar kind of annular
rings are noticed in Antarctica due to the continuous freezing and melting.
8. The temperature and the levels of the carbon dioxide fit closely with each other over the
period of the 1000 years.
9. According to the file the 10 hottest years are: 1990, 1991, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001,
2002, 2003, and 2004.
10. The recent 2017 source states that the ten hottest years are: 2004, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010,
2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017.
11. Other than the temperature, the weather phenomenon that have set records in the last few
years are: Hurricanes and it is caused due to rising ocean temperature, typhoons, tornados,
floods, increase in precipitation, lack of rainfall and increase in drought, breaking down of the
icebergs, thinning of the icecaps, melting of the polar ice caps, patterns of ocean currents change,
change in seasonal patterns.

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12. the most pronounced effects of global warming are noticed in the poles or the northern and
the southern hemispheres.
13. Oceans waters sink due to the two factors: ocean water temperature (Cold) and salinity.
14. The little ice age in Europe is caused when the last glacier was receding from the North
America, the ice melted and the giant pool of freshwater formed in North America, the Great
Lakes and the remnants of the huge lake is formed. An ice dam was formed on the eastern border
and on one day it broke. This resulted in to the rushing out of the freshwater and it diluted the
salt water of the adjacent ocean water. This altogether diluted the salty dense water in the region
and thus the movement of the ocean current stopped because the ocean water turned lighter and
warmer. This resulted in to Europe enter into a little ice age.
15. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the ice sheet over Greenland is the most
concern in regard to the rising sea level.
16. Currently we do not have one single technology to solve the global warming problem but we
have more than one like the electricity efficient appliances, other types of the electricity efficient
equipment, fuel-efficient passenger vehicles, battery operated vehicles, renewable energy sources
and the carbon capturing and the sequestration technologies can effectively solve the global
warming problem.
17. The major environmental problem in which we have made great progress in solving the
ozone layer depletion problem.
18. Due to the rise in global temperature, the temperature of the ocean water rises and this results
in the change of global ocean currents. The rise in temperature results in the 4 different types of
catastrophes like flooding of cities due rise in the sea level, hurricanes, less precipitation and

4NATURAL DISASTER
droughts. Temperature plays a major part in increasing the ocean water temperature, in changing
seasons and delaying them and melting the polar ice caps.
19. The implication of the ocean acidification is the inability of the corals to form their skeletons.
20. The reduction in the soil moisture content leads to drought in many areas and it affects the
agriculture.
21. The melting of the permafrost causes infrastructure to break and slide. When the permafrost
melts, future levels of carbon dioxide rises because it was previously trapped within.
22. The millions of years that nature took to sequester carbon inside the earth, we as humans are
bringing the same carbon and its different forms back into the atmosphere.