The Wizard Who Saved the World by Jeffrey Bennett

Author:Jeffrey Bennett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Big Kid Science
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Suddenly, his mom called him for dinner. Diego snapped out of the daydream. The crystal ball disappeared. His wand and his hat were gone, as were all his magical medicines, and foods, and schools. All that remained were the very real problems of the world. It was depressing.

“We surely need a wizard to save the world,” he thought, “but what can I do? I’m only a boy, and I don’t suppose I can really grow up to be a wizard.”

Rising Sea Level

Global warming will also affect sea level, for two reasons. First, global warming makes the oceans warmer. Just as a balloon expands when you heat it, the oceans will expand as they warm up. Although water expands only a little, there’s so much water in the oceans that this effect may cause sea level to rise by 30 centimeters (1 foot) or more during this century, which would mean more coastal flooding during storms.

Second, warmer temperatures can melt ice, and any ice that melts on land, such as the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, will flow into the oceans and raise sea level. (Floating ice, like that in the Arctic Ocean, does not affect sea level when it melts.) There is a lot of landlocked ice on Earth —

so much that, if it all melted, sea level would rise more than 70 meters (230 feet)! Fortunately, ice melting is a slow process, so even in the worst case it would probably take many centuries for all the ice to melt. But some melting is probably already underway, and even a relatively small amount of melting could raise sea level enough to flood many of the world’s major coastal cities, and to destroy vast areas of farmland.

No matter how you look at it, global warming is a problem with real consequences. We will have to live with some of these consequences, but surely it would be better to prevent as many of them as possible — and that is something we can do only by finding a way to stop adding so much carbon dioxide to our atmosphere.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.