Green house gases stay can stay in the atmosphere for an amount of years ranging from decades to hundreds and thousands of years. No matter what we do, global warming is going to have some effect on Earth. Here are the 5 deadliest effects of global warming.

5. Spread of disease As northern countries warm, disease carrying insects migrate north, bringing plague and disease with them. Indeed some scientists believe that in some countries thanks to global warming, malaria has not been fully eradicated.

4. Warmer waters and more hurricanes As the temperature of oceans rises, so will the probability of more frequent and stronger hurricanes. We saw in this in 2004 and 2005.

3. Increased probability and intensity of droughts and heat waves Although some areas of Earth will become wetter due to global warming, other areas will suffer serious droughts and heat waves. Africa will receive the worst of it, with more severe droughts also expected in Europe. Water is already a dangerously rare commodity in Africa, and according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming will exacerbate the conditions and could lead to conflicts and war.

2. Economic consequences Most of the effects of anthropogenic global warming won’t be good. And these effects spell one thing for the countries of the world: economic consequences. Hurricanes cause do billions of dollars in damage, diseases cost money to treat and control and conflicts exacerbate all of these.

1. Polar ice caps melting The ice caps melting is a four-pronged danger.

First, it will raise sea levels. There are 5,773,000 cubic miles of water in ice caps, glaciers, and permanent snow. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, if all glaciers melted today the seas would rise about 230 feet. Luckily, that’s not going to happen all in one go! But sea levels will rise.

Second, melting ice caps will throw the global ecosystem out of balance. The ice caps are fresh water, and when they melt they will desalinate the ocean, or in plain English - make it less salty. The desalinization of the gulf current will “screw up” ocean currents, which regulate temperatures. The stream shutdown or irregularity would cool the area around north-east America and Western Europe. Luckily, that will slow some of the other effects of global warming in that area!

Third, temperature rises and changing landscapes in the artic circle will endanger several species of animals. Only the most adaptable will survive.

Fourth, global warming could snowball with the ice caps gone. Ice caps are white, and reflect sunlight, much of which is relected back into space, further cooling Earth. If the ice caps melt, the only reflector is the ocean. Darker colors absorb sunlight, further warming the Earth.

Think about this for a moment. In the animal kingdom it is mostly the male that competes against other males for a female partner. For example, many male birds have bright colours and fancy plumage to attract a female partner. Males in some other groups have large tusks or horns to show strength and their ability to protect the female and her young.

Now in the seahorse world, things are a little different…..well so we thought. Since it is the male that becomes pregnant and gives birth to the live baby seahorses, it would seem logical that the female seahorses compete amongst themselves for male partners to care for their eggs. Well, that is what we thought. However, research has shown that it is STILL the males that compete for females. When male seahorses want to impress a female, they have tail pulling competitions, dragging each other around on the bottom of the seabed. They also snap at each other with their snouts and wrestle with each other using their long curved necks. They also display their pouches to the prospective female by opening and closing them, filling their pouches with water and expelling it with force, to show the fitness of the pouch for the birth process.

Not quite Ripliey’s but something to think about.

The male will eat food that happens to be in the area while the female will roam about in search of food. Regardless of this separation however, the female will always come back to the male to perform their daily ritual of entwining their tails and spiralling to the surface in a dance of celebration.
This ritual helps keep the pair synchronized reproductively. If a mate is removed or dies, it will take weeks to find a new mate, that is, if it is able to at all!

They give birth but they don’t lay eggs, they’re just taking good care of the egg of the female seahorses by keeping it in the pouch of a male seahorse.

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TTM, also known as trichotillosis,^[1] or more commonly as trich) is defined as “hair loss from a patient’s repetitive self-pulling of hair”^[2]and is characterized by the repeated urge to pull out scalp hair, eyelashes, facial hair, nose hair, pubic hair, eyebrows or other body hair, sometimes resulting in noticeable bald patches.^[3] Trichotillomania is classified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) as an impulse control disorder, but there are questions about how it should be classified. It may seem, at times, to resemble a habit, an addiction, a tic disorder or anobsessive–compulsive disorder.

The disorder “leads to noticeable hair loss, distress, and social or functional impairment”, and is “often chronic and difficult to treat”.^[3]

Trichotillomania may be present in infants, but the peak age of onset is 9 to 13. Depression or stress can trigger the trich. Due to social implications the disorder is often unreported and it is difficult to predict accurately prevalence of trichotillomania; the lifetime prevalence of trich is estimated to be between 0.6% (overall) and 1.5% (in males) to 3.4% (in females).

The name, coined by French dermatologist François Henri Hallopeau, derives from the Greek: trich- (hair), till(en) (to pull), and mania (“an abnormal love for a specific object, place, or action”)

I used to have this when I was a kid, it’s a good thing it just suddenly stopped. This is a mental illness which you can’t control yourself from pulling out your hair which leads you to baldness.