What will our home the earth be like within 30 years if the temperature keeps rising?

“Winters will be warmer and summers will be dramatically hot. The way we live will change, coats will soon be disappearing,” sophomore Jose Santos said.

On Feb. 2, the United Nation’s scientific panel studying climate change declared that the evidence of a warming trend is among us, according to The New York Times. Al Gore calls this a “planetary emergency.”

“Winters are becoming milder with less snowfall and freezing temperatures,” physical science teacher Thomas Frech said, arguing that the changes are already obvious.

Some students understand the effects of global warming. “It’s the over heating of the earth to a temperature where the ice caps melt,” sophomore Kenny Pinnock said.

Sophomore Tailandia Abernathy said that she does not do anything to prevent global warming because she does not think about it.

“I think most people don’t understand [global warming],” chemistry teacher Fredric Williams said. “It is a gradual rise in earth’s temperature, which essentially impacts weather patterns.”

Some of the heat rays from the sun that hit the earth are trapped in its atmosphere because of gasses such as carbon dioxide. This is a good thing because it is what keeps our earth at a stable temperature. However, the more gases society sets off in the atmosphere the more earth warming gets abused and causes less heat rays to escape the earth’s surface.

The global average surface temperature has increased by approximately 0.65°C over the last 50 years, the World Health Organization said. Deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years - to 300,000 people a year. In some regions like parts of Asia and Africa, the frequency and intensity of droughts have increased in recent decades, according to the group.

Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide, according to a fact sheet by climatecrisis.net, the official Web site for Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, predictions from years 2000-2010 carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase from 7.97 to 9.73.

By the time students are in their 40’s, most of Greenland will be melted, reducing the amount of animals that inhabit the area, like polar bears. “I don’t know if we’re doing enough because we’re in a disposable age where instead of recycling we’re in demand of making a new product,” Frech said.

About 40 percent of the U.S.‘s drinking water depends on water falling from the springs. Within 50 years or less, all of the artic caps and glaciers from these mountains will melt and will deeply impact that 40 percent, according to the presentation of Al Gore, as seen in “An Inconvenient Truth.”

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, climatologists have discovered 2007 to be the Earth’s second hottest year tied with 1998, within a century.

Within a century greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise some 20 degrees Fahrenheit, according to an article posted by J.R. Pegg on www.ens-newswire.com.

Author of the photo-essay “Save My World,” New Jersey 17-year-old Abhishek Seth shares advice supporting pro-environment actions. “First [you have to] switch all of your regular light bulbs to fluorescent light bulbs,” Seth said.

Many students feel that it is too hard to counteract global warming. “[Truthfully] no. I still use those [polluting vehicles] you know, bad habits die hard,” junior Evans Severe said.

The Energy Federation is a pro-environment organization that only promotes resource-conserving products. “CFLs (compact fluorescent light bulbs) use 60 percent less energy than a regular bulb [and] this simple switch will save about 300 pounds of carbon dioxide a year,” the Energy Federation Web site writes. “If every family in the U.S. made the switch, we’d reduce carbon dioxide by more than 90 billion pounds.”