How can you help Antarctica?

Answer 1

Global warming is the warming up of the planet above the temperature it "should" be. It is such a concern at the moment as it seems that the temperature is rising at a rate far faster than ever before and it is thought that it may be the activities of the human population over the last 150 years or so that is doing it.

Mean temperatures over the whole planet have risen by about 0.74° C (1.33° F) in the last 100 years. More than half of this increase has happened in the last 25 years. The temperature records used to calculate this are extensive, they have been assembled from thousands of observation sites on land and sea covering a large, representative portion of the Earth's surface. Checks and allowances have been made for any bias that may have arisen from the weather stations or instrument changes.

This is a worry because while the planet can cope with changes in temperature which are known to have happened over periods of tens and hundreds of thousands of years in the past and certainly over millions of years.

The current rate of change is much, much faster than any changes have ever before as far as we are aware and this is a real problem as while animals and plants can adapt to slow changes by migration for instance, a rapid change will inevitably lead to large extinctions of many species. The human population of the earth is also dependent on a stable climate for established agriculture and also cities, millions if not billions of people stand to suffer from the consequences of global warming mainly the most vulnerable people in the undeveloped nations.

Climate changes in the past over Geological time periods (millions and tens of millions of years) have been very drastic. During cold periods, much of the planet, even thousands of miles from both poles have been ice covered by huge glaciers and during warm periods, the same regions may have been subtropical or even tropical. Accompanying this have been large changes in sea level so that some areas of land have either become flooded completely or left high and dry.

It is potentially an enormous problem as if the global temperature rises to a level where it is affecting the Antarctic icecaps, they may begin to melt and cause sea-level rises globally measured in meters. There are a great many cities around the world that are on the coast and they would be flooded and probably have to be abandoned. There are also a great many countries, especially poorer countries where a large part of the population live in coastal regions. In this case the farmland would be flooded and the people left homeless and without the ability to feed themselves. In some cases entire island nations (albeit small ones) in the Pacific Ocean could simply disappear.

There are two questions about Global Warming that the world has at the moment and neither of them has a clear answer, there is much scientific debate and an awful lot of political argument too.

Answer 2

No animal calls Antarctica home: none live there. Sea mammals and sea birds that breed on Antarctic's coasts are not listed on any endangered species list.

Answer 3

No wildlife lives on the Antarctic continent that requires protecting. Some sea birds and sea mammals breed on Antarctica's beaches, and again, do not require protection from humans there.