AMID THE THREAT to the fate of the Planet hangs in balance because of recurring changes in 'climate and weather' and also global warming as well as the over population on the earth in over hundreds of years, based on the several researches by the scientists throughout the world,, a new set of expert opinion has emerged, ruling out misunderstanding of the ecology of human system and any threat to the, Planet ! In a 'opinion essay', recently published in the New York Times, its author Erle C Ellis, an associate professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a visiting associate professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, has written that many scientists believe that by transforming the earth's natural landscapes, "we are undermining the very life support system that sustain us." Like Bacteria in a petri dish, "our exploding numbers are reaching the limits of a finite Planet with dire consequences". Disasters looms as human exceed the earth's carrying capacity.clearly, this could not be sustainable."This is non-sense. Even today, I hear some of my scientist colleagues repeat these and similar claims---often unchallenged. And once , I too believed them. Yet these claims demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of ecology of human systems. The conditions that sustain huminity are not natural and never had been. Since prehistory, human population have used technologies and engineered eco-systems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered "natural" ecosystems." Although I am not so qualified on such arguements, I have written an essay "Threat to Life on the Earth vis-a-vis the Earth is Itself Threatened" on July 06, deliberating the threat aspects , based on well researched subjects on the topics on www.kksingh1.blogspot.com
On the other hand,.Book Review from the London Review of Books, by Thomas Jones, under the headline, " How can we live with it ?" has different opinion on the topic ! Jones has quoted a boy,telling his family members that "global warming is a load of codswallop", trying to explain the difference between climate and weather.."Global warming, he insisted,is load of codswallop" A "Nature Geoscience, published a paper showing summer melting on the Antarctic Peninsula at a level unprecedented over the past thousand years.The codswallop brigade say that even if the climate is changing, it is not our fault. 'We human beings, Boring Johnson wrote, in the Telegraph in January, 'have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that fate of the planet is in our hands'. On the one hand, then, the modest mayor of London. On the other, a former head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (as paraphrased by Brian Stone ):Only Newton's laws of motion may enjoy a wider scientific consensus than a human-enhanced greenhouse effect' effect. There is no consensus, however, either scientific or political, about the best ways to respond to the problem; in part because so many possible avenues of research are being explored, and it is still too early to say which, if any, have a reasonable chance of leading us out of the woods (or rather the desert or the flood plains).'
According to Jones; the green house concept, was first visualized by Joseph Fourier in 1814 and was proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seebn as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon-dioxide and other trace gases did not trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth would not be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know thus because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Green;land and Antartica; the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The concentration has increased from nearly 320 parts per million ( high but not unprecedented) in 1960 to more than 390 ppm today, 30 percent higher than any previous peak, largely as a result of human activityNot even the most fervent climate change denier can argue with the fact that burning carbon dioxide levels were 280 ppm. Since 1850, more than 360 billion tonnes of fossil fuels have gone up in smoke. Average global temperatures have risen accordingly, for the last quarter century pretty much in line with the predictions made by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change in its first assessment report in 1990. After every year since 1988, when the IPCC was established, has been the hottest ever recorded. The most opitimistic projections, which governments are nominally committed to (that is to say, the signatories of the Copenhaagen Accord in 2009 greed it would be nice) is that average global temperature will rise no more than 2oC by the end of the century. Sea level has six cm since 1990.The IPCC;s fourth assessment report-2007- projected that it would rise between 18 and 59cc by 2100.
More over, the aim of the United Nations Frame work Convention on Climate Change, negotiated at the the Earth Summit In Rio de Janeiro in 1992, had decided to stabilize greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Even after the elapse of 20 , nothing tangible has come out. And the emission of carbondioxide in huge scale is going on , endangering the man-kind. Of the world;s eight biggest national emitters of carbondioxide, which between them account for more than 66 percent of global emissions, only Germany (2.4 pc) has agreed to legally binding reduction in the second commitment period (2013-20),.Canada (1.7 pc ) has withdrawn from the [rotocol; the United States (16 pc) never ratified it; China (29pc), India 5.9pc); Russia (5.4 percent), Japan (3.7pc) and South Korea (1.8pc) are still signatories but do not have binding target. China, which is generating energy through coal firepower stations and burn much of the black stuff as the rest of the world put together, is doing such things to manufacture goods for export to the west. Thus China is pumping as much carbon dioxide into atmosphere as it was 30 yeers ago.There is thinking that if China stop burning coal, everything will be OK. China, however, is trying to switch into renewable energy (hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermal ) as well as setting up an emission trading scheme like the one the EU had introduced in 2005.
All these haphazard emissoon of carbondioxide are making the life miserably of people throughout the globe and the time is not so far off when the entire globe will be perished under toxic exercises; researchers have predicted. strange climate change and atmosphere have developed.. Devastating heatwave that swept Europe ten years ago when temperature of 100oF was recorded for the first time ever in UK,are expected throughout the globe and similarly cold -like situation will prevail in the globe. In the EU alone over 70000 citizens of 12 countries died from heat wave in the summer of 2003. Similar heat wave had been recorded in different countries of the globe and over two lakh people die every year in different countries of the world.LBR suggests that the outlook may not be so bad for American and British cities. But the news that there are ways for the global north and west to adapt and to tolerate global warming is hardly reassuring for, say, the 12 million residents of Dhaka, which face a much greater risk of flofding and has far less money to spend on defences. A paper published in Nastural Hazards last year comparing the vulnerablity of flodding nine cities found-unsurprisingly, but is is useful to have quantified-that Shanghai, Dhaka and Calcutta, now Kolkata were far more vulnerable than Rotterdam, Marseille and Osaka. The director of the Research Institute of Global Climate and Ecology at the Russian Academy of Science, has said that "it would be cheaper to resettle Bangaladeshis threatened by sea -level rise than to adhere to the kyoto protocol-and cheaper still to do neither. A recent report of UNICEF has also given warning signal about the impact of vulnerable climate change effect on children of the globe. Despite discussions in the Kyoto conclave on global changes and warming etc and subsequent commitments, global emissions are enormously higher than they were in 1990 and the climate change policy had achieved nothing
While the entire globe is endangered with such alarming situation, Ellis is optimistic and says that earth would bear the burden of all these evil things in natural manner. He says, in his opinon piece in the New York Times, " The evidence from archaeology is clear. Our predecessors in the genus Homo used social hunting strategies and tools of stone and fire ti extract more sustenance from landscapes than would otherwise be possible. And of course,, Homo sapines went much further, learning poor generations , once their preferred big games became rare or extinct, to make use of a far broader spectrum of species. They did this by extracting more nutrients from these species by cooking and grinding them by propgating the most useful species and by burning woodlands to enhance hunting and forging success. Even before the last ice age had ended, thousands years before agriculture, hunter-gatherer societies were well established across earth and depended increasingly on sophisticated technological strategies to sustain growing populations in landscapes long ago transformed by their ancestors. THe planet's carrying capacity for pre-historic human hunter-gatherers was probably no more that 100 million, But without their Paleolithic technologies and ways of life, the number would be far less-perhaps a few tens of millions. The rise of agriculture enabled even greater population growth requiring even more intensive land-use practices to gain more sustenance from the same old land. At their preak, those agriculture systems might have sustained as many as three billion people in poverty on near vegetarian diets.".
Ellis, however, admits, and says, " there is no environmental reasons for people to go hungry now or in future. There is no need to use any more land to sustain huminity-increasing land productivity using existing technologies can boost global supplies and even leave more land for nature-a goal that is both more popular and more possible than ever"
Thus, I feel strongly, that while the nature with the man-kind in sustaining all the menaces, the problem created by ambitious countries to play cruel jokes with nature, is certainly wipe out the globe and its people.
REFERENCES:- New YORK TIMES ,London Book Review's Books-namely Buy the Carbon Crunch: How We are Getting climate Change Wrong and How to Fix It, by Dieter Helm, BUY Earth Masters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering by Clive Hamilton, Buy the City and the Coming Climate:Climate Change in the Places We Live by Brian Stone.
No comments:
Post a Comment