Cause and Effect for Global Warming
Still, this is the advantage of the new direction, that we do not anticipate the world dogmatically but that we first try to discover the new world from a critique of the old one. . . . If the construction and preparation of the future is not our business, then it is the more certain what we do have to consummate--I mean the ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless also in the sense that criticism does not fear its results and even less so a struggle with the existing powers.
-- KARL MARX, LETTER TO ARNOLD RUGE 1979
Twenty-first-century world is one that has seen more social and natural destruction. In the realistic details of this cognitively focused and magnified alternative future, humanity, as it has been doing for centuries, is still killing the world. The actual conditions, however, have now reached the critical stages predicted in the previous century.
Global warming has continuously been a part of occurred as a natural phenomenon but currently the state of our environmental deprivation has converted it from an international benefactor to a global threat. Global warming happens while part of the long wave emission escaping from the Earth through the air is trapped by a number of gases and re emitted back to the planet thus raising its temperature. The most operative of these gases is water vapor. The existence of water vapor and its global warming properties conserve the surface of our planet at a middling temperature of 15 degree C instead of -18 degree C which would have happened if, like Mars, Earth had very little moistness in its atmosphere. Other global warming gases are carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, nitrous oxide and CFCs. The warming portent is also known as greenhouse warming as of a rather vague analogy with the boosted warming inside a glass bounded structure in the cooler climates, used for growing plants which need a lot of warmness. Global warming gases consequently are also known as greenhouse gases.
Bill McKibben wrote eloquently of global warming as a metaphor for the end of nature, The temperature and rainfall are no longer to be entirely the work of some separate, uncivilisable force, but instead in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of lifeBy changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made sic and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Natures independence is its meaning without it there is nothing but us.
(McKibben, 198947, 58)
The oil-based economy has finished once and for all, radioactive poisoning has spread globally, and power balances have lifted, but no other large-scale war has yet occurred. In addition to this single military cataclysm, a slower gush of economically induced ecological damage has taken its toll as global warming. Besides the eradication of entire geographical regions producing the toxic raw into which humans cannot venture without protection, large numbers of people have died, and the birthrate has dropped partly because of pesticides, toxic waste accumulations, radiation hoarded in the groundwater and the food chain.
Thus, the world of the second half of the twenty-first century may have been closely destroyed by national and military egotism and capitalist greed, as many rain forests are cut down, deep and strip mined, the peasants are driven off the land and cash crops are raised till the soil gives out. The oceans have flooded large coastal zones--such as the rice paddies and breadbaskets of the delta countries like Bangladesh and Egypt--and rich farmlands have turned into deserts in the North American Great Plains, the Eurasian steppes, the increasing wastes of Africa, and the denuded Amazon basin.
Global warming became problematic when the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, was amplified by anthropogenic activities such as burning biomass, transfiguring coal into electricity at power stations, and liberating CFCs into the atmosphere. The added amount of these gases then produced undue warming by more efficiently trapping the telluric radiation and sending it back.
Kathy Maskell and Irving M. Mintzer, writing in the British medical journal Lancet, describe the carbon cycles natural balancing act
Over the past 10,000 years, the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases has remained fairly constant, and this represents a remarkable balancing act of nature. Every year natural processes on the land and in the oceans release to and remove from the atmosphere huge amounts of carbon, about 200 billion tons (gigatons) in each direction. Since the atmosphere contains about 700 gigatons of carbon, small changes in natural fluxes could easily produce large swings in atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and CH4 methane. Yet for ten millennia natural fluxes have remained in remarkably close balance. (Maskell and Mintzer 1993, 1027)
The meditation of carbon dioxide has increased precipitously from the mid-fifties. Of all the greenhouse gases, it makes the major impact on global warming about fifty times more than any other gas. Water vapor is also an enormously efficient greenhouse gas, but its amount in the atmosphere does not upsurge. Gases such as methane or CFCs tend to enthrall long-wave radiations at explicit wavelengths, and increase the warming mostly carried out by carbon dioxide. If we require controlling global warming, lowering the radiation of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere must be our prime target, though the radiation of other greenhouse gases also needs to be controlled.
The current rate of average global warming is expected to be around 0.5K with the possibility of a small deviation. This rate is expected to rise by the middle of the next century due to the growing presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The rise in temperature, however, will fluctuate both seasonally and latitudinal. Winter temperature in polar areas and both winter and summer climate in moderate latitudes will show the biggest comparative change. Increased temperature can give rise to reduction of snow cover and sea ice, higher evaporation, greater rainfall and increased storminess in the tropics.
The worlds population quadrupled during the last 100 years the global economy expanded 14-fold energy use increased 16 times, and industrial output went up by a factor of 40. Water use rose nine times, and carbon dioxide emissions went up 13 times. And what may be the most important overall is that humans in the 20th century used 10 times more energy than their forebears during the entire 1,000 years before 1900 (McNeill 2000, xvxvi, 272, 360361).
Currently, the conventional projections of sea level rise by the year 2050 range between 5 cm and 40 cm. A rapid rate of melting of the Greenland ice and the collapse of the west Antarctic ice sheet will move these estimates higher. As much as three meter has been proposed as the disaster scenario but it seems possible that the world would not have to cope with a sea level rise of more than fifty cm in another fifty years.
Other possible effects of global warming are less clearly known and still need more research. It is however expected that the major rivers of the world will undergo adjustments to cope with changes in climate and sea level. Some rivers might become more seasonal and flood prone. Coastal erosion will rise and so will slope failures. The glaciers in the mountains will retreat rapidly. These physical changes will also have follow-up effects, such as deficiency of water and electricity combined with changes in ecosystems. Vegetation zones can shift pole wards when the climate is warmer or upwards into the mountains. If the rainfall pattern shifts it would also be followed by vegetation changes and faunal movement. Distribution of mangroves and coral reefs in the tropics and ecosystems at the desert edges could be predominantly affected.
According to the IPCC, In aquatic and coastal ecosystems, such as lakes and streams, warming would, have the greatest biological effects at high latitudes, where biological productivity would increase, and at the low-latitude boundaries of cold- and cool-water species ranges, where extinctions would be greatest. The geographical distribution of wetlands is likely to shift with changes in temperature and precipitation. Somecoastal ecosystems are particularly at risk, including saltwater marshes, mangrove ecosystems, coastal wetlands, sandy beaches, coral reefs, coral atolls and river deltas. (Bolin et al. 1995)
Other changes will implicate soil moisture, temperature range and pattern of agriculture. Major changes in agricultural production would lead to national economic hardships or affluence which in turn may have political implications. That is the most indefinite of all projected effects of global warming.
As this destruction contributing to dystopian society, the present social order is confrontationally portrayed through the distancing lens of its imagined alternative. Though there has always been a high level of cooperation amongst the world environmentalists, but it seems that such cooperation will need to be more practical. Global warming is currently confined mostly to a number of governments and activists, the scientific data and opinions that deny the environmentalist rendering of global climate data are playing a very substantial and growing role in extenuating opposition to greenhouse policies. Moreover, as much as global warming was successful as an ecological ideology and mobilization strategy, it needs to be recognized as well that movements that base their claims and agenda on scientific knowledge rights are also susceptible to their ideas being deconstructed by and through science.
Indeed, the utopian horizonis significantly just that the home at which we have not yet arrived, the untaken space at the limits of engaged political vision and practice that retrocedes as it is approached, the space that essentially informs the present moment but always remains at the front of the journey so that nothing can be taken for granted or frozen in place, so that the effort to attain the best for all people, in the most self-determined manner, does not stop. Conceivably, the realization of the importance of this informed negative process is what motivates the deep urge to dystopia in our time, avoiding the consolations or premature elicitations of the fullness of Utopia in favor of benefiting the difficult way toward that better place.
Categories:
0 comments:
Post a Comment