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Jack Oughton
Unless you have been living in a hole for the past decade, or have made serious
efforts to avoid breaking news, you’ve probably noticed the words ‘global
warming’, and are aware of the controversy they bring and emotions they stir
wherever they are spoken. Former presidential candidate Al Gore’s Academy
Award winning film An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006 to a flurry of
media activity, taking $49million dollars worldwide at the box office, and
seems to be convincing evidence that in this day and age people are starting to
take interest in global warming. It follows him in his famous lectures around
the world as he tries to raise awareness on climate change. As we know,
however, human nature is to disagree on everything, and naturally the film (and
it’s message) was criticised. President Bush famously pulled America; one of
the world’s largest consumer of resources, out of a treaty that would limit the
amount of polluting emissions America could release. When asked if he’d even
watch the film, he simply responded “doubt it”.
To simplify the political issues a little; the debate itself is almost an ideological
war, a focus point in the battle between liberals and conservatives, Democrat
and Republican. The almost clichéd debate between the right to do business
and prosper weighed off at the expense of the environment. Not for the first
time, political motives succeed in clouding important issues.
The idea that humanity could actually be influencing the climate was not really
taken seriously by the scientific community until the 1960s. In 1958 an
American Oceanographer, Charles Keeling began long-term measurements of
atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. His
research data showed an unmistakable link between the amount of greenhouse
gasses in the atmosphere and an increase in global temperature. In the 1820s
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered that greenhouse gasses (in order of
abundance; water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone)
trap heat radiated from the Earth's surface after it has absorbed energy from the
sun. This is the greenhouse effect hypothesis. Without it there could be no life
on the earth as the temperature would be too cold. However, the burning of
‘fossil fuels’ for energy such as gasoline, coal, and natural gas, mean that this
warm blanket may soon become a smothering shroud as an estimated 3.2
billion metric tons of carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere annually. In
1896 Svente Arrhenius, a Swedish Chemist and Nobel Laureate, showed that
doubling the carbon dioxide content of the air would gradually raise global
temperatures by 5-6C. Time magazine ran a cover story on the idea of a
warming world as long ago as 1939, boldly proclaiming “weathermen have no
doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer”.
But what exactly is global warming? Global warming is the process in which
the planet’s average air and ocean temperature increases, this means the overall
temperature increases, but individual regions experience more varied
temperature fluctuations. Global warming is not new, throughout history the
Earth’s temperature has changed significantly in response to periodic natural
events and changes. Previous changes have been linked to events such as minor
changes in the earth’s orbit and orientation, impacts from large meteors, or
from particularly catastrophic volcanic activity, thickening the atmosphere with
dust and reducing the earth’s exposure to the sun’s rays. Natural variations in
the sun’s output are thought to play their part and even changes in ocean
circulation, which can be seen in atmospheric events such as El Nino, which by
virtue of an area of the Pacific ocean heating by just 0.5°C, can result in
drought in Africa, flooding in South America, and hurricanes in Australasia.
Then where is the controversy? The controversy arises from the argument
that global warming is a natural process, it is obvious that disaster scenarios
sell, the film industry has an entire genre based around the idea (see above).
Throughout history there are always examples of unfounded media alarmism,
recent examples such as SARS; which was hyped as a ‘superbug’, yet had a
mortality rate of 9.6%, or the H5N1 bird flu, which despite 5 years of
scaremongering, has yet to appear.
In 1923, just 16 years before the ominous article in TIME, a front page article
in the Chicago Tribune declared: “Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out
Canada.” The article quoted a Yale University professor who predicted that
large parts of Europe and Asia would be “wiped out” and Switzerland would be
“entirely obliterated.”
The exploitation of abundant resources by the developing world gives the
people of these countries an opportunity to experience the quality of life of the
developed world, and who are we, who have spent the last 300 years since the
industrial revolution, devastating the planet in our own way, to stop them?
Much of their future economic growth will depend directly on the effects of
industry and the energy required getting it. For them, it is just not financially
viable to use cleaner, but more expensive sources of power, or to enact
industrial protocols that would decrease pollution but stifle much needed
industrial growth.
References
[ALL ACCESSED 27/02/08]
Business and Media Institute; Fire and Ice
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/FireandI
ce.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ice/chill.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/jan/08/climatechange.climatech
angeenvironment
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggccebro/chapter1.html -
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-little-ice-age-medieval-
warm-period.htm
http://gemini.oscs.montana.edu/~geol445/hyperglac/eroproc1/
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=Venus
http://www.ghgonline.org/predictions.htm