Major Causes of Global Warming

Global warming is a result of increasing temperature of earth's atmosphere due to several factors that can be natural or man made. Whatever may be the factors the effect of global warming is not in favour of mankind and hence need to be controlled.

The main reason behind global warming is the increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to green house effect. Green house effect leads to increase in the temperature of earth by trapping the sun's heat and light in the earth's atmosphere. In this phenomenon the heat and light of sun enters the atmosphere but cannot go out as they are trapped in earth's atmosphere by the green house gases and thus resulting in temperature rise. The green house gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide plays the major role in green house effect and excessive emission of these gases through various means is a major cause of global warming.

Another important reason for global warming is large amounts of carbon dioxide produced from burning of fossil fuels for the different purposes especially for power generation in various power plants. Due to burning of large amount of coal in power plant excessive amount of carbon dioxide is emitted in different forms in the atmosphere. In addition to that, countless number of vehicles running in the road today is one of the major source of emission of a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leading to increase in the temperature of earth's atmosphere.

Methane is another green house gas that results in global warming to a large extent. Methane can be easily obtained from rice paddies, bovine flatulence, bacteria in bogs and fossil fuel manufacture and hence easily available in abundance. Moreover, it is 20 times as effective as Carbon dioxide at entrapping heat in the atmosphere and is a leading cause of global warming. Similarly, another green house gas called nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs is also responsible for the global warming. Nitrous oxide has 300 times more capacity of trapping heat than carbon dioxide while chlorofluorocarbons have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide.

Another major cause of global warming is continuous cutting of a large number of trees across the world that is also referred as deforestation. It is projected that, 34 million acres of trees are cut and burned each ear resulting in 25% of all carbon dioxide release entering the atmosphere.

Increasing population is another cause of global warming that cannot be neglected. As human being is known to exhale carbon dioxide means more population will lead to more emission of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting in increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus resulting in global warming.