index > Today's Earth, Our Future > 4. The earth as a greenhouse > It's Getting Too Hot

It's Getting Too Hot

Have you ever heard the words "global warming"? This is the name for the condition, or phenomenon, of a gradually rising earth temperature. When you have a cold or become ill, you get a fever, right? Similarly, the earth's "body temperature" is steadily increasing.

When there is global warming, there are many problems, and not simply that the air is too hot. In fact, we are already experiencing some trouble.

One example is that there are more typhoons, hurricanes and storms because of global warming. Do you know how water circulates? It falls down from the clouds as rain, then it flows into rivers and seas, then it evaporates into the sky, and finally it becomes rain again. The higher the air temperature, or the hotter it becomes, the more rain there is.

When it rains too much, it floods more often. This is because the amount of the water that evaporates from the ocean increases when the temperature rises. As everyone knows, hurricanes and floods can cause great damage. Houses get blown away, roads and bridges get destroyed and many people get killed.

Also as temperatures rise, ice will melt. Indeed, the ice in Antarctica and the Arctic has been melting in recent years. Polar bears in the Arctic and emperor penguins in Antarctica are in trouble. If they could talk, surely they'd be saying, "Help us! Our homeland is getting smaller and smaller and our food supply is getting smaller, too."

When the ice of Antarctica and Greenland and the glaciers melt into water, the water flows into the sea and the sea level gets higher. The current sea level has risen about 20 centimeters. If global warming keeps up like this, the sea level will increase by about a meter.

If the sea level rises by a meter, 80 percent of the beaches in Japan will sink under water and we won't be able to swim in the ocean anymore. In Bangladesh, where the population is growing rapidly and many suffer from poverty and hunger, half of the paddy fields have sunk under the sea and so food is in even greater demand.

If the earth's climate continues to change and if the temperature rises three more degrees Celsius from today's temperature, Japan's climate would become the same as the land located 300 kilometers to its south.

Go ahead and check on a map to see how far 300 kilometers south is from where you live. The trees and grass that grow there will start to grow in your country. The existing varieties of trees, grass and animals would change. In Japan, even the delicious rice that now grows throughout the country will grow only in the north.

Also we will have to worry about malaria, a tropical disease carried by mosquitoes. Every year, one to two million people throughout the world lose their lives from this disease. There is no mosquito carrying malaria in Japan today, but people worry that if Japan's climate changes from global warming, the disease would probably spread throughout the country.

Temperatures on earth were stable until several decades ago. The graph of temperature changes shows that the average global temperature has been rising for the last 20 to 30 years. If something that used to be stable begins to change, it means that something is happening. If global warming continues, what will happen to our food? Won't most animals and plants disappear?

Global warming will cause (and in fact, is already causing) a variety of problems--and this doesn't just mean that we'll be feeling a little hotter!

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