Environmental scientists were suspecting for a very long time that global warming is somehow related to the relentless emission of CO2. But recent studies are enabling scientists to clearly establish a cause and effect relation between these two. This claim got strengthened when a recent study conducted by the National Science Foundation was published in the internationally acclaimed journal, Nature. The conclusion of the study pointed toward strong evidences, which make CO2 emissions responsible for much of the global warming that became evident after the advent of industrial era and even before that.
Many scientists were claiming for a long time that it was the rising level of CO2 that was responsible for initiating the end of Ice Age, but most of them failed to establish a convincing explanation for this. But, now the oceanic and atmospheric scientists from Harvard and Columbia University are suggesting that if we try to reconstruct the model of earth on a global scale, not alone examining Antarctic temperature, we will find that the natural changes in CO2 level on the global scale and greenhouse effect could have started the end of last Ice Age.
Researchers are suspecting that a small shift in the orbit of earth around the sun, increased the amount of sunlight received by the Northern hemisphere and as a result ice sheets in the northern part of the globe suddenly started to melt at an unusually rapid rate. It totally disrupted the normal rate of heat conduction between the northern and southern hemisphere. A rapid air current from the southern part of the globe to the northern part, carried along massive amount of CO2 generated from the deep sea, which fastened the greenhouse effect. As a result, within 10,000 years the last ice age came to an end.
The most disturbing and glaring statistic of this study is that the amount of CO2 that accumulated during this time span of 10,000 years, which ultimately brought the earth out of the ice age, can now be generated just within 200 years owing to rapid industrialization and human activity. So the key lesson to learn from this scientific report is to check our CO2 emission in order to curb the rapidly rising global temperature.
Via: Oregonstate
