Global Warming

Global warming is a concept that denotes the temperature increase in the earth’s atmosphere due to the huge emissions of carbon dioxide emitted by human activity, mostly through the inconsiderate combustion of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal. Although climate scientists have been warning against the potentially disastrous effects of global warming for decades, no large-scale counter-measures have been taken so far. Scientists say that global warming will cause increasingly extreme weather patterns: greater heat, greater cold, stronger wind, more or les rain. The increasing warmer temperatures are causing the ice caps in the North and South Poles to melt, which results in rising sea levels. A recent research project that analyzed trapped air in the Antarctic ice core concluded that the present levels of CO₂ are the highest in 800,000 years, that the fastest increase during that period was during the last seventeen years, and that a similar hike in CO₂ levels has never happened in less than a thousand year period up to now. One of the researchers involved said that there is nothing in the ice core that gives us any reason for comfort and that changes of CO₂ levels in the past have always been accompanied by climate change. Although skeptics, especially in the USA, doubt that human activity is responsible for global warming, suggesting that it could be natural occurrence, leading climate scientists and politicians such as AL Gore and Tony Blair connect global warming to the ever increasing combustion of fossil fuels.

Global warming is a global problem in the sense that it is caused globally and has effects globally. The emission of CO₂ in one area of the world will have effects on the climate everywhere. Thus, even if the emission of CO₂ is reduced in Europe, the great increase of CO₂ emissions in rapidly developing countries such as India or China will cause this reduction to have no effect.

The Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair, said that the world was facing “nothing more serious, more urgent, or more demanding of leadership” than climate change. Speaking at the launching of a major economic report commissioned by British Treasury, Blair said there was “overwhelming scientific evidence” that climate change was taking place and that the consequences of failing to act would be “disastrous”. According to the report, “Our actions over the coming decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20^th century.”

A recent UN report, the Global Biodiversity outlook, states the need for unprecedented effort to slow down the decline in the richness of natural systems throughout the world. More species of animals and plants are becoming extinct now than at any time since the demise of the dinosaurs sixty five million years ago. And this is all due to human activity. The misuse of modern technology causes our natural environment to collapse in such a way that eventually it might not be able to support people anymore.

Recently, I had first hand experience of the effects of global warming when visiting Europe. When I grew up in the Netherlands, it was a cool and drizzly country even in summer. However, when I was there at the end of June, a tropical heat wave started to envelope the whole of Northern Europe, and in some areas temperatures soared above 35?c.These extreme heat waves were unknown in Northern Europe until few years ago. When the heat wave was over, unprecedented tropical rainstorms inundated streets .At the time of writing this article, at the end of October, 2006, the temperatures are still unusually high in the Netherlands. The trees still carry their leaves, which would normally only be found in distant southern European areas with mild winters and warm summers, have started to appear in the Netherlands during the last few years. Due to the warmer weather, southern creatures find conditions suitable in the north and rapidly move up. Another consequence of the heat waves in Europe was that yields of crops were affected, and consequently the prices of certain foods such a milk and bread went up. With a large part of the Netherlands being land below sea level that is only protected by dykes from the sea, Dutch government organizations are naturally taking global warming seriously. Serious plans have been made on how to deal with drastically rising sea levels, and what to do when the large rives that flow through the Netherlands overflow due to rapidly melting snow in the Alps in spring and heavy rains in summer. In Switzerland, where I also went, I was told that the glaciers on the mountains are disappearing, and where there previously was ice and snow on the mountains during the summer, now there is none.

Recent plans for shifting over from fossil fuels to nuclear power would increase the risk of nuclear disasters, and besides this, the building, maintaining, and especially the decommissioning of nuclear plants and the storage of nuclear waste uses tremendous amounts of energy obtained from fossil fuels. The is no guarantee that future societies, which might not have the same resources as we have now, will be able to handle nuclear waste left over from us. Moreover, uranium is an even more limited resource than oil, and economically viable extraction might finish within twenty years. Alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar power, are attractive alternatives, but, as these technologies don’t create large-scale industries and income for governments, their introduction has been slow.

Among the family and friends I talked to in the Netherlands there was a general acknowledgment that the climate is changing: however, when one touches upon the causes and results of it, then a visible uneasiness arises, and the topic is changed. For many, it is difficult to accept that human activity can change the climate. Weather has always been something that has been considered unpredictable and uncontrollable. In pre-modern times, and still, in traditional cultures, it was supposed that gods who controlled the weather, and the only thing that humans could do was to try to placate such gods by making offerings. With the rise of the scientific technological worldview, the consequent belief in an all-controlling god responsible for the weather vanished. Statistical research in Netherlands has shown that when fertilizers and pesticides first started to be used on large scale in the 1950s, church attendance in farming communities drastically dropped because farmers no longer needed to solicit the help of God for a successful harvest, Even then, although the weather could be predicted to a fairly accurate degree, it was not believed that humans could influence or control the weather. Now, however, it has become apparent that humans are responsible for the increasingly extreme weather patterns that are appearing in many parts of the world. A reasonable argument for this possibility is that, if people are responsible for such drastic changes in the natural world as the holes in the ozone layer in the stratosphere, the drying up of the Aral Sea in the former then why couldn’t people cause atmosphere to heat up?

Most people don’t want to think about the prospect of having to live in a world with increasingly extreme weather conditions combined with increasingly limited natural resources to compensate for the calamities such as floods, famines, mass refugee movements, and warscaused by it.

In the case of global warming, although the effects seem at first unclear and slow, scientists are warnings us, once it has started, there will be no way it can be stopped. The carbon dioxide and methane now put in to the atmosphere will not leave it for decades. The comfortable view that technology is eventually going to solve all problems can be considered a wrong view. It is wrong in the sense that is the nature of the world to be uncontrollable. New problems will always crop up. Due to a wrong, unrestrained use of technology, modern humanity could end up off worse-off than is les technologically advanced, but perhaps more sensible and content ancestors.