Atmospheric Pollution-( Global Warming) Research Proposal

Atmospheric Pollution-( Global Warming) - Research Proposal Example Time and time again, man has proved his propensity for destroying his own habitat. Globalization and industrialization and the need to compete with the rest of civilization in producing and marketing their products worldwide have pushed such basically agricultural countries as China, India and Brazil to raze down their virgin rainforests to give way to thousands of acres of industrial parks. In Brazil alone, millions of acres of Amazonian rainforests were massively cleared and burned for conversion to villages and industrial parks (King & McCarthy 2005,p.35). As a result, in 1987 alone, it was reported that 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide or CO2, the main component of the so-called greenhouse gases, were evaporated into the air (Rifkin 1993,p.224). Trees are known absorbers of CO2 in the air and soak up enormous amounts of CO2 so that cutting and burning them up were responsible for 20% of all CO2 emissions. In the Sahel region of Africa, natives cut off trees for use as fuelwood and allowed their herds to overgraze what's left of the bushes. As a result there was intense desertification especially in Mali, Chad and Niger as rains stopped in 1970 and temperatures reached up to 49degC causing drought and famine and deaths of animals, plants and people (DiPiazza 2007,p.13). The Nobel-Prize winning IPCC or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, "Deforestation, biomass burning including fuelwood and other changes in land-use practices release CO2, CH4 and N2O into the atmosphere and together comprise about 18% of the enhanced radiation forcing" (Humphreys 1996,p.16). Since the industrial revolution in the 1880's, man has been frenetically burning coal, oil and natural gases in factories and industrial plants. Today, that industrial revolution has gone haywire as the unfettered madness to burn fossil fuels result in the release of CO2, methane or CH4, nitrous oxide or N2O and hydrofluorocarbons or CFCs into the air, creating an invisible greenhouse that pollutes the upper atmosphere, lock the heat inside and radiate this heat back to earth. Without these greenhouse gases, all the incoming sunlight normally strikes the earth's surface, causing it to emit infrared waves and most of the resultant heat simply travels unimpeded back into the void. With the presence of these greenhouse gases that envelop the earth's atmosphere, this outgoing infrared radiation is instead absorbed by the greenhouse gases,