Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth’s surface air and oceans. Global warming is an event that is currently a problem as there has been a definite increase in the temperature of the Earth’s surface and oceans since the mid-20th century. The primary cause that has been found for this is an increase in the level of greenhouse gas levels. Greenhouse gasses are naturally in our atmosphere and they act as a blanket for our planet by keeping the heat in and not allowing it to escape. This makes earth livable and we need it to survive but if there is too much in our atmosphere it will make the earth become too warm and people and many other living things will no longer be able to survive. Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas that is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. This is because CO2 is the main gas that is created whenever we drive cars or burn coal for energy. We are concerned about the rising levels of CO2, which is why we focused on this for our project.
The increase in the temperature will do many things to our planet but one of the main things that will happen is the polar arctic sea ice will melt. In our project we have predicted the arctic sea ice size from the present until 2050. To accomplish this we wrote a program in Python that will output the future levels of the size of the arctic sea ice. The way we have done this is by taking the past data and making a line of fit for it. Then we projected the line further into future years. We also wrote a program in Python that will ask for a CO2 amount in parts per million (PPM) and will give a predicted amount of the size of the ice with that amount of CO2 in PPM. Another thing that we did is we made a program in Scratch that is a visual representation of the second Python program. The Scratch program asks for a CO2 level in PPM and then shows an increase in the arctic sea ice’s size or a decrease depending on the amount of CO2 input.