Global Warming
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God created us and we created pollution. Pollution is a by-product of our everyday life, especially the activities involved with economic aspects. Every economic activity in human society always tends to produce a certain quantity of pollution. The fact that economic activities inevitably lead to pollution will not be a problem by itself, since the great nature possesses certain capability of self-regulation and self-purification. However, pollution occurring beyond the limit of nature cannot be controlled anymore. Todays vast economic activities essentially produce a huge amount of pollution that will eventually breakdown the balanced state of the global environment. Much of the human world is considered to be common. Common in a sense that it is open to anyone for use and return the waste back to it. This has caused what so called Tragedy of the commons as noted in a paper written by Garrett Hardin [1]. As long as something is free, people tend to abuse it while being reluctant to fix any problems they might have generated to it. As the environment has been considered to be free, people has abused it beyond allowed limits.
Recently, environmental degradation and its effects have become one of the hottest potatoes among many social and political issues. The key point of the argument is weather humans cause the global warming in a significant manner. Some people claim that human intervention causes the globe to be warmer; while others argue that the global warming is only a natural occurrence. Indeed, many still believe that the global warming is merely a natural phenomenon that is not controlled by humans at all. By Natural it means that humans neither significantly affect the occurrence of climate changes nor humans can control effect. However, most-updated scientific evidences show that humans influence is what considerably enhances the magnitude of the global warming trend.
The most severe form of the environmental degradation is climate change, as it is ultimately important input for many human activities, which intimately related to the subsistence of human. Climate can be defined as “conditions of the atmosphere at a particular location over a long period of time” [2]. Generally, climate includes variability and extremes, experiencing severe fluctuation due to internal effects; however, it may also be forced to change because of external influence [3]. One of the most imminent external influences is the human intrusion, which causes significant environmental degradation and transformation of climate. Among many signs of environment degradation, global warming is the most perceptible aspect of climate change that is enhanced, if not solely caused by humans. In fact, the meaning of global warming has become the core aspect of climate change. A section of a written document by Scientific Alliance has pointed out that: “Climate change now becomes synonymous with anthropogenic (human-induced) global warming” [4].
Of course, humans do something to lower their influence on the environment such as design for environment and air-pollution prevention technology. Design for environment is the practice of environmentally-responsibility by considering the environmental impacts of the final products from the design stage while pollution prevention is the technology applied to the existing products to lower their environmental impacts [5]. Both of these methods have improved the ecological impacts of humans. However, the following passage from the the Skeptical Environmentalist written by Bjorn Lomborg, suggests that the effort is not significantly saving the environment:
“Most discussions about the environment end up pointing out that, despite all other indicators that may show us doing better and better, we still have to change our current lifestyle drastically because our way of life is now changing the climate and causing global warming. [6]”
Global warming is caused by the excessive presence of global warming gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere that allows the incoming solar radiation from the sun while blocking the re-radiation of the earth to the space. The presence of such gases is very critical for humans survival, as they trap heat energy from the sun to keep the surface of the earth at a sustainable level for humans. However, when a plethora of such gases exists in the atmosphere, a distortion in the earths balance of heat energy is resulted. In other words, the amount of heat radiation that escapes from the surface of the earth back to the space decreases while the amount of heat coming from the sun remains unchanged, and hence the temperature of the earth will increase as a result of heat accumulation [7].
Despite the issue of the recent global warming phenomenon, meteorological evidences show that the earth has gone through the cyclic