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Power Plant Environmental Issues

Objective #1

There are a great and many impacts that carbon dioxide emissions from power plants can and in fact do have on the environment. The main issue of concern is that the sheer volume of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere will increase the Earth’s overall average temperature. This phenomenon has been termed internationally, ‘global warming’. It is the general overall belief of the scientific community that global warming is not a theory or a subject up for debate any longer, but that it is indeed a real event that has been rapidly increasing ever since the industrial revolution took place.
The belief that global warming is occurring at a rapid pace is generally accepted to be true; however, the causes for global warming are still a subject for heated debate amongst the scientific community. There are those who believe that the planet earth’s average temperature has always been subject to change and that the earth goes through periods of both heating and cooling on cyclical patterns. It is these people who believe global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon and is not in any way affected by human behavior, despite what supporters in human contribution to global warming claim as evidence to the contrary.
It should be stated that the majority of members of the scientific community believe that the main immediate global warming cause is the increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is true that human beings, due to the demands of life in modern society, produce vast amounts of carbon dioxide and eject it into the atmosphere. Once emitted to the atmosphere they trap a certain amount of originally solar energy (which would have otherwise escaped to space), and thus radiate this energy back to the Earth raising the planet’s average temperature. So, the first fundamental global warming cause is an absolute dependence of the modern human society...