How soon global warming is going to effect human beings?

Answer 1

Some of Yahoo Answers is very generous on doing homework for someone. I think you know everything about global warming by now.

Answer 2

Global warming caused by man is happening right now. Ask a polar bear whose habitat is in trouble.

20-50 years for severe effects to modern civilization.

But it will be obvious we have a real and serious problem before that.

Answer 3

Hi, Adity-

Hole in the ozone layer? RIGHT NOW!
Millions of tons of crap DAILY into the atmosphere is nothing to sneeze at. Pun intended.

We are screwing ourselves over for a buck.
Shooting ourselves in the herd.
Stepping on our own ducks.
Cutting off our nose to spite our finch.
Kicking ourselves in the aardvark.

We're ruining it for everybody and everything, and people who can't accept it are three fries short of a Happy Meal.
Have a nice day.

Answer 4

Increasing the surface temperature of the Earth by some amount doesn't merely increase the average low and high temperatures by that amount, evenly, all over the globe. The Earth's climate is a dynamic, chaotic system which is driven by heat: Adding more heat gives the system more energy, which results in more frequent, and more intense, severe weather events. Fires and droughts, floods and blizzards will all become more common and more intense, as will storms of all sorts. This pattern of changes is exactly what we have been seeing more and more in recent years. Moreover, the situation will continue to get more extreme in every imaginable way, and in some ways we can't imagine.
Here are a few examples of what's been happening. All these occurred in one year, 1998 (the warmest year on record):

- Unusually severe monsoon rains flooded two thirds of Bangladesh for over a month and destroyed the homes of over 20 million people. (The next year the monsoons failed to arrive on time, leaving millions of acres of forest burning in Indonesia for months.)

- Hurricane Mitch, with 180 mile-per hour winds, killed 11,00 people in Honduras, while destroying 70 percent of the crops, a third of the homes, and all of the sewage handling facilities.

- Severe drought affected 45 countries, intensifying already severe food and water shortages.

- Wildfires, some of them lasting for months, devastated many areas, all over the globe, including areas of rain forest which traditionally have been considered immune to forest fires.

In total, extreme weather events in 1998 forced 300 million people from their homes -- five percent of all the people in the world. Over the first 8 years of the 1990s, insurance companies paid out over 90 billion dollars in claims related to severe weather -- four times the total for the preceding ten years. Late in 1998, one of the largest reinsurance companies in the world, Munich Re, announced that large areas of the world, including the southeastern U.S., were likely to become uninsurable in the near future.

Many of the negative effects of global warming cannot be seen in the data for a single year. For example, climate changes force many plant and animal species to migrate, as temperature extremes make it harder for them to survive in their current ranges, or evolve into more temperature-hardy forms. However, two factors will make the current changes difficult to survive for many species. First, this change is happening faster than normal -- evolution, and even migration for some species, will be too slow. Second, man-made barriers of all sorts -- superhighways, dams on rivers, clear-cut forests, urban areas stretching for dozens and even hundreds of miles, and extensive agriculture will make migration difficult or impossible for many species, making the total rate of human-caused extinctions of species much higher than it already is.

Some species will benefit. Among them are heat loving insects that can fly. Already deadly tropical diseases like malaria are moving further north and to higher elevations.

One of the most frightening effects of global warming is the fact that it is somewhat self propogating: A warmer world makes some of warming more likely. For example, forest fires occur more often, more severe, and harder to control -- and forest fires release vast amounts of CO2, accelerating the warming trend.

The list of serious problems that we are already seeing is very long -- and some of the scientists' projections of what the situation might be like in a hundred years, predictions made just a few years ago, have already happened!

So, the situation is already very bad, and it is certainly going to get worse, no matter what people try to do about it. But, as we'll see in the next section, we can do something, many things, to reduce the rate of warming and even eventually begin to lower the temperature.