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Ebola 2
In 1976, Ebola virus made it s first appearance in Zaire, Africa, causing the death of hundreds of people. The second outbreak occurred western Sudan, also in 1976. These were large outbreaks, resulting in more than 550 cases and 340 deaths. In 1979, Ebola mysteriously re-appeared in Sudan causing

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Gold mining is a rapidly growing industry, with new laws being passed each day for protection of waterways, endangered species and their habitats. New ways of extracting the gold are also being introduced. Gold is a very valuable substance, both financially and scientifically. Gold is completely un

Global Warming Extended Definition Essay

The importance of the stratospheric ozone layer, which filters out most of the sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation, in protecting the Earth's surface from the harmful effects of solar ultraviolet radiation has been recognized for many decades. It was not until the early 1970s, however, that scientists began to actually grasp the fact that even relatively small decreases in the stratospheric ozone concentration can have a serious impact on human health--an increased occurrence of skin cancer, particularly in fair-skinned people. The process that causes this decrease in the stratospheric ozone is referred to as global warming. The most definite cause of this process has not been determined, yet scientists are aware of its reality and harm to humans. Many scientists believe global warming is caused by the increase of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, while other scientists believe that the health threat caused by global warming is due to an unusual interaction between cosmic rays and clouds as well as other natural occurring events.

The National Weather Service announced that 1998 was the warmest year (on record on average, around the world). A recent tree-ring study indicated that this is the warmest decade in six hundred years (Allen & Herreid, 82). Undeniably, the weather is getting warmer. According to an article in The Economist, a conservative newsmagazine,

"The sea is warming, the plankton dying; floods are sweeping the land. In California, the climate is acting in a peculiar way. So, too, in Antarctica, where unlooked-for flowers are blooming as the ice shelves disintegrate In Southern Africa, it looks as though the rains will fail. Again. All over the world, there is something odd about the weather" ("Feuding over Global Warming", 6).

There may be nothing out of the ordinary about these latest extremes in the weather, but they may all be part of a climatic conspiracy.

The people who believe in this climatic conspiracy believe that the greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, pumped into the atmosphere by humans are warming the globe and changing the Earth's climate. They believe that global warming is occurring because, "these gases [greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide] are transparent to sunlight, which warms the Earth, but absorb infrared radiation, by which the Earth radiates heat out into space" (Kay, 5). This suggests that humans along with carbon dioxide are responsible for the global warming and the outrageous weather occurrences in process. Excessive carbon dioxide from automobiles, causing the ozone layer to be depleted, is one explanation for what is causing global warming. Many scientists and world leaders believe carbon dioxide is the culprit to this alarming dilemma, while others do not support this theory at all.

Taking the opposite view, some scientists and politicians believe that global warming may be less humanity's fault than the sun's fault.

"The Earth's climate fluctuates in a ten to twelve year cycle, in parallel with the rise and fall of the number of sunspots-transient dark patches on the face of the sun the current rise in the earth's temperature owes more to a bigger, longer-term change in the sun's output-an increase in the average number of sunspots measured over the course of a cycle-and less to the greenhouse gases " ("In flux: a strange interaction", 66).

Sunspots, created by twisted magnetic fields on the face of the sun, determine the sun's brightness. The surface magnetism on the sun and its brightness runs on an 11-year variation....

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