Writing Resources
During the horrendously hot dry summer of 1988 everybody became familiar with the terms global warming and greenhouse effect Crops failed so disastrously in the Midwestern United States that cattle had to be slaughtered for lack of grass to feed them Winds swept topsoil into dark clouds on the horizon clouds reminiscent of the dust bowl days of the 1930s Newspaper articles and television reports showed pictures of barges stranded in the Mississippi River which was running dry and of forest fires that ravaged millions of acres in the west In the eastern states temperatures were so unbearably high that assembly lines were shut down in some factories The Soviet Union and China were similarly drought stricken torrential rains plagued parts of Africa India and Bangladesh At one stage three quarters of Bangladesh was under water In the Yucatan Peninsula exceptionally intense Hurricane Gilbert practically swept tows into the sea At the end of that year the cover of Time magazine had a picture not of the Man of the Year but of planet Earth a planet in peril In televised congressional hearings scientists sounded the alert that summers such as that of 1988 are likely to increase in frequency as a consequence of our industrial and agricultural activities which are causing an increase in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases The picture shows that the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels was off to a slow start around 1850 the beginning of the Industrial Revolution then faltered during the Great Depression of the 1930s speeded up after World War II and started to sprint during the 1960s
