'Global Warming Problem/Solution Essay\r'

'For the past two centuries, at an accelerating rate, the basic composition of the man’s atmosphere has been materi completelyy altered by the fossil- displace effluvia of machine culture. Human-induced change of the Earth’s climate is emerging as cardinal of the major scientific, social, and frugal issues of the twenty-first century, as the cause of climate mixed bag become evident in everyday life in locations as varied as sm tout ensemble island nations of the Pacific Ocean and the shores of the rubber Ocean. The â€Å"greenhouse effect” is not an radical which is tonic to science.\r\nIt has merely become more easily obtrusive in our sentence as temperatures chip in move up and scientists have devised more sophisticated ways to gradation and forecast atmospheric processes. The atmospheric balance of â€Å" come after” gases actually started to change beyond natural leaping at the dawn of the industrial age, with the first large-scale in tent of fossil fuels. It became noticeable in the 1880s, and an historic force in international climate change by intimately 1980. After an intensifying debate, the idea that human activity is warming the earth in potentially damaging ways became generally accept in scientific circles by 1995.\r\nAddressing the consequences of spheric warming go forthing demand, on a widely distributed scale, the material body of social and economic mobilization experienced in the unify States merely during its birthing revolution and manhood War II, and therein lies a caper. The buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is a nearly invisible, incremental crisis. century dioxide is not going to bomb Pearl harbor to kick start the mobilization. Author Jonathan Weiner observes, â€Å"We do not respond to emergencies that unfold in slow motion. We do not respond adequately to the invisible” (Weiner, 1990, 241).\r\nIt has been tell (not for attribution) that the best thing whic h could happen to raise originationwide concern about global warming would be a quick collapse of the West polar ice sheet, which would raise knowledge basewide sea take a notable number of feet everywhere a very short time. When stock brokers’ feet evolve affluent on the ground floor of New York city’s World Trade Center, all the world’s competing economic interests might mobilize unneurotic and provide the sociopolitical receptions necessary to address the atmosphere’s overload of greenhouse gases before it is too late.\r\nThe corresponding water that could lap at the ground floor of the Trade Center as well as would ruin closely farmers in Egypt and Bangladesh and slosh in the lobbies of glass towers of Hong Kong and Tokyo. Perhaps, only then, might all of macrocosm heed the implications of gaffer Seah’tl’s f arwell speech a century and a half ago. We may be brothers (and sisters) after all. So far, humankind’s in corporated nervous systemâ€national and international leadership, state-supported opinion, and so forthâ€hasn’t done overmuch about global warming.\r\nAs of this writing, the flora and brute of the planet Earth are still in the position of a laboratory anuran go under in steadily warming water. This is not a secret crisis, just a politi reverberatey brackish one. Al Gore, in Earth in the proportionateness: Ecology and the Human Spirit, raised a sociopolitical call for mobilization against human-induced warming of the Earth: â€Å"This point is crucial. A option to ‘do nothing’ in response to the mounting evidence is actually a choice to continue and even accelerate the reckless environmental destruction that is creating the catastrophe at hand” (Gore, 1992, 37).\r\nIn his book, Gore, then a U. S. senator, called for a â€Å"global marshal Plan,” to include stabilization of world population, the rapid invention and development of envi ronmentally appropriate technologies, and â€Å"a oecumenical and ubiquitous change in the economic ‘rules of the bridle-path’ by which we measure the impact of our decisions on the environment” (Gore, 1992, 306). Eight stratums after Gore issued his manifesto, fossil-fuel runs had educate in the joined States. Gore had captured the Democratic companionship’s nomination for president of the United States, and global warming had slipped from campaign radar.\r\nFrom this vantage point, one imagines the world lurching through the twenty-first century as global human organisms opinion soft galvanizes around yr after year of high temperature records, and as public policy only slowly begins to catch up with the temperature curve. The temperature (and e finickyly the dewpoint) may wake the global frog before he becomes poached meat. Whatever the vector sum of the public policy debate, the odds are passing high that the weather of the year 2100 will be notably warmer than today, as greenhouse â€Å"forcing” exerts an ever-stronger fiber in the grand dance of the atmosphere which produces climate.\r\nRoss Gelbspan observes, â€Å" planetary warming need not require a reduction of living standards, but it does demand a rapid shift in patterns of fuel employmentâ€reduced use of oil, coal, and the lighter- blowed natural gas to an delivery more reliant on solar life force, fuel cells, hydrogen gas, mite, biomass, and other renewable ability sources. It is doubtful that capitalistic market forces will bring about this shift on their own, because market prices of fossil fuels do not incorporate their environmental bes. ” (Gelbspan, cc4)\r\nGeorge Woodwell has been quoted as saying, â€Å"[For] all practical purposes, the era of fossil fuels has passed, and it’s time to move on to the new era of renewable sources of energy. ” The other alternative, says Woodwell, is to accept the fact that â€Å"[t ]he Earth is not simply moving toward a new equilibrium in temperature…. It is entering a period of continuous, progressive, unrestricted warming” (Gordon and Suzuki, 2001, 219). In Jeremy Leggett’s opinion, â€Å"The uniquely forbid thing about global warmingâ€to the many an(prenominal) people who see its dangersâ€is that the solutions are obvious.\r\nThere is no denying, however, that creating the necessary changes will require paradigm shifts in human behaviorâ€particularly in the land of cooperation between nation-statesâ€which have literally no case law in human history…. There is no single issue in human affairs that is of greater importance. ” (Leggett, 2000, 457) accord to a Greenpeace Report modify by Leggett, â€Å"The main routes to surviving the greenhouse panic are energy efficiency, renewable forms of energy labor…less greenhouse-gas-intensive agriculture, stopping deforestation, and reforestation” (Leg gett, 2000, 462).\r\nGreenpeace also recommends redirecting spending away from armaments and toward development of a sustainable energy for the future of humankind (Leggett, 2000, 470). Of the broader picture, Michael MacCracken writes, â€Å"The underlying challenge is for industrialize society to achieve a balanced and sustainable coexistence with the environment, one that permits use of the environment as a resource, but in a way that carry on its vitality and richness for future generations….\r\nThe challenge [is] to metamorphose our ways before the world is irrevocably changed… toward displacing militarization and the ever-increasing push for greater national consumption as the primary driving forces behind industrial activity. ” (MacCracken, 2001, 35) concord to Donald Goldberg and Stephen Porter of the Center for International world(prenominal) rightfulness: â€Å"The Clinton administration has bungled repeated chances to initiate internal measure s. For example, recent legislation proposed by the White strain to restructure the electric utility industry could have been crafted to require utilities to reduce their one C-dioxide emissions.\r\nIn fact, the Environmental security measure Agency lobbied hard for the authority to impose a cap-and-trade program on utilities’ CO2 emissions, similar to the craft system that has lowered sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions in a cost-effective way. This was a golden opportunity, as the restructuring bill of fare is projected to save the average consumer roughly $200 a year, which would have more than offset the cost of reducing GHG [greenhouse-gas] emissions. Unfortunately, the White House chose to forgo this opportunity. ” (Goldberg and Porter, 1998)\r\nAccording to Goldberg and Porter, loopholes in the Kyoto Protocol, adopted at the insistence of the United States, permit richer countries to avoid many of its mandated emission reductions by purchasing bring home the bac onances from other countries through the protocol’s â€Å"flexibility chemical mechanisms. ” The Buenos Aires Climate Conference (1998) negotiated a mechanism allowing trade in greenhouse gas emission rights in two markets. The first market would allow â€Å"sellers,” nations which exceed greenhouse gas-reduction targets set in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, to offer their rights for sale to â€Å"buyers,” countries which have not met their targets.\r\nThe second market, the unfermented Development Mechanism, will allow industrialized countries to suffer part of their greenhouse-gas-reduction quotas by transferring clean technology to poorer countries so that antipollution projects can be carried out there. â€Å"If it buys all (or most) of its reductions,” Goldberg and Porter write, â€Å"the United States will not get its own house in order. In the long run, efficiency and productivity in the U. S. economy will suffer because domestic industry wil l be shielded from any incentive to adapt” (Goldberg and Porter, 1998).\r\n downstairs these provisions, the United States could â€Å"purchase” emission reduction credit from nations, such as Russia and Ukraine, which reduced their greenhouse-gas emissions during the nineties because their economic infrastructure collapsed. The continuing political wrangling over the Kyoto Protocol illustrates why the world is responding so slowly to the impending crisis of global warming. Climate diplomacy frame an arena dominated by competition of special (mainly national) interests. Meanwhile, a few countries, most of them in Europe, are taking steps to mitigate greenhouse forcing on their own.\r\nWhile British emissions of greenhouse gases by the year 2000 had fallen between five and six pct compared to the Kyoto Protocol 1990 targets, emissions in the United States rose 11 percent between 1990 and 1998. Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions rose 13 percent during the 1990s, w hile several European countries (including Britain) do substantial progress toward meeting the goals of the Kyoto Protocol by reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions as much as 10 percent compared to 1990 directs.\r\nDenmark (which produces less than one percent of humankind’s greenhouse gases) underwent something of a mobilization against global warming during the 1990s. Denmark was planning â€Å"farms” of skyscraper-sized intrudemills in the North and Baltic seas that, if plans materialize, will supply half the nation’s electric provide within 30 years. The danish pastry wind-energy manufacturers’ association believes that electricity produced through wind power on a large scale will be financially competitive with power from plants burning fossil fuels, which will be phased out if wind power set ups itself.\r\nSvend Auken, Denmark’s environmental and energy minister, give tongue to that with half of his country’s power approach pa th from Norwegian hydroelectric plants and the other half from wind power, the country is planning to meet its electricity call for within three decades while reducing carbon dioxide production to nearly zero. The wind farms must prove their endurance in winter storms and stand up to the corrosion of seawater, but if they can, Denmark’s windmills will oppose the production of 14 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.\r\nWhile the fossil-fuel economy remained firmly entrench in most of the world at the childs play of the millennium, gains were being achieved in some basic areas of energy conservation. In 1994, for example, the average person in the United States was recycling 380 pounds a year, up from 62 pounds in 1960, a 613 percent increase (Casten, 1998, 101â€102). succeeding(a) the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1972, the United States also made a concert effort to limit the production of nitrous oxides by gas turbine railway locomotives. Before regulation, the t ypical gas turbine engine emitted 200 parts per million (p. p. m. ).\r\nSince then, several technical innovations have reduced emissions to below 10 p. p. m.. engineering science was being developed in the late 1990s which could reduce the rate to two to three p. p. m. (Casten, 1998, 117â€118). The problem is at once very simple, and also astoundingly complex. increase human populations, rising affluence, and continued dependence on energy derived from fossil fuels are at the crux of the matter of the issue. The complexity of the problem is illustrated by the degree to which the casual lives of machine-age peoples depend on fossil fuels. This dependence gives rise to an array of local, regional, and national economic interests.\r\nThese interests cause tensions between nations attending negotiations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The cacophony of debate also illustrates the strength and diversity of established interests which are being assiduously protected. Add to the hum an elements of the problem the innocent randomness of climate (as well as the nub of time which passes before a given level of greenhouse gases is actually factored into climate), and the problem becomes complex and pertinacious enough to (thus far) seriously impede any serious, integrated effort by humankind to fashion solutions.\r\nReferences\r\nCasten, doubting Thomas R. (1998). Turning Off the Heat: Why the States Must Double Energy Efficiency to render Money and Reduce spheric melting. Amherst, N. Y. : Prometheus Books. Gelbspan, Ross. (2004). A Global Warming. American Prospect, 31 (March/April). Goldberg, Donald, and Stephen Porter. (1998). In Focus: Global Climate Change. Center for International Environmental Law, May. Gordon, Anita, and David Suzuki. (2001). It’s a Matter of Survival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gore, Albert. (1992).\r\nEarth in the rest period: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Leggett, Jeremy, ed. (2000). Glo bal Warming: The Greenpeace Report. New York: Oxford University Press. MacCracken, Michael. (1991). Greenhouse Gases: Changing the Global Climate. In Joseph P. Knox and Ann Foley Scheuring, eds. , Global Climate Change and California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 26â€39. Weiner, Jonathan. (1990). The Next One Hundred Years: do the Fate of Our Living Earth. New York: Bantam Books\r\n'