Ecosystem Change and Public Health - Assignment Example

Pollution Running head: Global Warming ATMOSPHERIC POLLUTION GLOBAL WARMING) In APA Style Pollution 2 Abstract The world has repeatedly been alerted by the IPCC and by ex-Vice President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" that humanity by its own self-destructive acts especially its pollution of its own atmosphere, is well on its way of signing finis to its own survival in this planet. This paper details the causes of this global warming particularly atmospheric pollution and the negative impacts of this phenomenon to the human race. It also plans sustainability strategies and programs to mitigate the effects of global warming. It then summarizes all actions done by society and governments world-wide to desperately halt this march to self-extermination. Main Body Time and time again, man has proved his propensity for destroying his own habitat. Globalization and industrialization and the need to compete with the rest of civilization in producing and marketing their products worldwide have pushed such basically agricultural countries as China, India and Brazil to raze down their virgin rainforests to give way to thousands of acres of industrial parks. In Brazil alone, millions of acres of Amazonian rainforests were massively cleared and burned for conversion to villages and industrial parks (King & McCarthy 2005,p.35). As a result, in 1987 alone, it was reported that 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide or CO2, the main component of the so-called greenhouse gases, were evaporated into the air (Rifkin 1993,p.224). Trees are known absorbers of CO2 in the air and soak up enormous amounts of CO2 so that cutting and burning them up were responsible for 20% of all CO2 emissions. In the Sahel region of Africa, natives cut off trees for use as fuelwood and allowed their herds to overgraze what's left of the bushes. As a result there was intense desertification especially in Mali, Chad and Niger as rains stopped in 1970 and temperatures reached up to Pollution 3 49degC causing drought and famine and deaths of animals, plants and people (DiPiazza 2007,p.13). The Nobel-Prize winning IPCC or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, "Deforestation, biomass burning including fuelwood and other changes in land-use practices release CO2, CH4 and N2O into the atmosphere and together comprise about 18% of the enhanced radiation forcing" (Humphreys 1996,p.16). Since the industrial revolution in the 1880's, man has been frenetically burning coal, oil and natural gases in factories and industrial plants. Today, that industrial revolution has gone haywire as the unfettered madness to burn fossil fuels result in the release of CO2, methane or CH4, nitrous oxide or N2O and hydrofluorocarbons or CFCs into the air, creating an invisible greenhouse that pollutes the upper atmosphere, lock the heat inside and radiate this heat back to earth. Without these greenhouse gases, all the incoming sunlight normally strikes the earth's surface, causing it to emit infrared waves and most of the resultant heat simply travels unimpeded back into the void. With the presence of these greenhouse gases that envelop the earth's atmosphere, this outgoing infrared radiation is instead absorbed by the greenhouse gases, which happen to include water vapor (Aron & Patz 2001,p.222). The overheated greenhouse gases radiate most of the resultant heat back to earth causing the earth's temperature to rise and thus disturbing the earth's sensitive ecological balance. With increased heating, more water vapor from the world's oceans, lakes and rivers evaporates into the atmosphere and adds to the greenhouse warming. Global warming however, experienced an interregnum when volcanic eruptions in Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines produced a cooling down effect all over the globe in 1991. Pollution 4 The earth cooled down temporarily for two years when stratospheric sulfate aerosols emitted from the volcano's eruptions reflected the sun's light back to the space void and absorbed infrared radiation (Aron & Patz 2001,p.221). The IPCC has identified CO2 emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels as the main culprit of this global warming. The IPCC estimates that 60% of the global warming is due to CO2 emissions and with agricultural societies converting to industrialization there is an increase of 0.3% of CO2 concentrations per annum (Suplee 1998,p.44). Of the global output of greenhouse gases, 70% comes from industrialization (Ramphal 1992,p.93) with the USA alone responsible for 25% of greenhouse gas emissions (Gottlieb 2006,p.481). According to CGD/Carma sources USA emitted 2,790 million tons of CO2 with China coming close to its heels with 2,680 million tons of CO2 emitted. With the persistent, manic push for industrialization comes uncontrolled overpopulation and modernization and . Lifestyles drastically change as there ensues a mad scramble for acquisition of material things i.e. cars, private planes, air conditioners and other appliances that lap on kilowatts of electricity, produced in fossil fuel-powered electric plants. With consumerism comes massive dumping of garbage, which decays to release methane to the atmosphere. Methane which is also generated by fossil fuel production, cattle ranching and bacterial action in rice fields, account for 15% of global warming. With overpopulation comes the need to provide housing estates and thus deforestation and more efforts to provide food to the now 4 billion world denizens. These entail use of pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers which together with combustion process in automobiles release nitrous oxide to the atmosphere (Halmann & Steinberg 1999,pp.1-5). With overpopulation, natural resources must be developed. Mining of more coal and other ores result to Pollution 5 leakage to the atmosphere of CO2. The search for oil sources is even intensified ensuring potential sources of CO2 emissions. With overpopulation comes the need for governments to provide transportation such as buses, trains, jet planes, ships- all emitters of CO2. In fact, CO2 annual global emissions have alarmingly reached 27 billion metric tons ( Holmberg 1992,p336) and scientists have warned that global temperature increase would be elevated from 1 to 8 degC in the next 50 years and with an 8degC increase, that will signal kaput to human civilization. And everything faces the direction of human extinction as La Nina and El Nino phenomena, forest fires and other freaky weather conditions continue to rage on. In March 1997, relentless rains forced the Licking River in Falmouth, Kentucky to overflow and rise 24 feet above flood stage, killing 23 people and demolishing 400 million dollars of property (Steinberg 2003,p198). In Turkey, temperatures all across the country rose 2-4 degrees higher in late 2007, causing soils to crack up dry and a river, lake and reservoir to dry up and the agricultural production to be severely affected. The culprit is the fast evaporation of water stocks (Homepage). In Alaska, temperature has gone up to 4degF bringing about the retreating of sea ice from the coastline causing erosion and landslides and affecting human settlements, coastal climate and marine ecosystems (Moser & Dilling 2007,p54). But what most scientists fear is the melting of the ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica because total melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels by around 7 meters and 61 meters respectively (Pugh 2004,p174). With the constant escalation of world temperatures, islets and low-lying islands are in danger of being submerged into the seas. In fact at the moment, Kiribati, Vanuatu, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu are fast submerging into the Pacific Ocean because of rising sea levels. (Marks 2006,p1). In the coral reefs of Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea meanwhile, extensive bleaching caused by seas' rising temperature resulted to the killing of its coral reefs and Pollution 7 ecological imbalance in the seas (Spalding 2001,p.328). The above examples should be enough to convince skeptics that climate change is no laughing matter. Everybody will be affected as millions of people will have to bear disease, injury and death because of deadly heatwaves, forest fires, hurricanes, snowstorms, floods, and drought. No one will escape its impact (Johnson 2008,p.89). The most tragic irony of it all is that the poorest of the world's population, which contributes the least pernicious emissions will suffer the most because they are the least able to cope while those which contribute the most, like USA, Russia and Germany will suffer the least. Current Sustainability Strategies and Solutions After the showing of Al Gore's Oscar-award winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, humanity has been alerted on factors that threaten to bring humanity to the brink of extinction (Gore 2006,p.11). This brought so much social impact that the whole world is forced to formulate measures sustain life on earth (Aufderheide 2007,p.8). Because UN's IPCC had been relentless in providing "available scientific, technical and socioeconomic information in the field of climate change and provide information to policymakers" (Harris 2003,p.175), governments and private organizations rose to the occasion to find solutions and strategies to halt and possibly reverse global warming. The first major effort was the 1989 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where delegates from 178 nations pooled their resources to contribute solutions to the nagging problems in "transboundary air pollution, deforestation, desertification and 24 other problematic areas" (Speth & Haas 2006,p.68). The Kyoto Protocol followed suit in 2001 where 169 nations were made to cut down Pollution 8 their greenhouse gas emissions by 5% below 1990 levels by 2008-12 in order to realise a 5% drop in temperature by 2012 (Burniaux 1999,p14). With the Bali Conference, the delegates pressured the world's top 26 developed countries to support a 50% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 (Pataki 2008,p71). Britain's Stern Report suggested the laying down of environmental taxes and investment of 2% of GDP to steer clear of the worst effects of global warming (Stern 2007,p48). The UN Environmental Programme in 2004 created the "Champions of the Earth" Award to be conferred to anyone who makes significant contribution to the protection of the planet's environment and resources. The State of California and 10 other states and 400 cities enacted laws that strictly limited carbon emissions. Brazil and other countries then implemented the 'alternative fuel program' which makes use of ethanol, methanol and biodiesels in lieu of petroleum. The World Bank then launched a $300 million fund to fend off global warming by preserving forests in a grand forest protection scheme. Plan of Sustainability My plan for contributing to the fight to sustain and save this planet is two-pronged i.e. actions in both the national and the community level. Sustaining a clean, healthful atmosphere cannot be done by solo efforts thus joining such group as Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth International is one step in the right direction. In the community level, I will organize my family, neighbors, friends and strangers who share the same advocacy to make a concerted effort to protect the environment and mitigate global warming. It will start by convening everybody and dividing the group into committees. An education committee will research and compose write-ups that will express the group's objectives and planned solutions and strategies. It will also prepare a newsletter and flyers for distribution to the whole city about the severity of the problem. A finance committee will take care of finding financial resources and donors to Pollution 9 bankroll the projects. A committee of speakers will address the citizens in public places to urge them to take action in the face of environmental crisis. Such will include the planting of trees; the reducing, reusing and recycling (because when you do, you send less trash and help save resources like trees, oil, aluminum etc); by convincing people to desist from burning trash, follow proper waste disposal or even to stop smoking; by voicing out against smoke-belching vehicles and urging industries that emit pollutants to control their pollution; by writing in newspapers to condemn violators of The Clean Air Act and to suggest that the government utilize solar, wind and geothermal energies; by asking education officials, principals, teachers to embark on a massive educational campaign to inform the students about global warming with the use of audiovisual materials and probably the showing of An Inconvenient Truth and their roles to help avert it and and ask them to include discussion of ecological issues in the classrooms; by persuading people to use mass transit instead of private cars and to use bicycles, better still by walking; by turning off radios, TVs and other appliances when not used. By making all these sacrifices, the people should be made aware that they are making contributions to reduction of emissions of pollutants like CO2 in the atmosphere. Since time is of the essence, the writers have to finish their research and write-ups in a span of 3 days; the public speakers must do their part on Sundays where many people converge. It is also essential that the organization be attached to other national associations that share the same aims to fortify the group and that it cooperates with the proper government Institutions or authorities whose objectives are in line with the aims of the group such as the Departments of Environment and Natural Resources and Health. Conclusion Global warming especially air pollution is a reality and a world tragedy of catastrophic proportion is waiting if denizens of this planet do not act and the sooner they act, the better. All this talk about global warming is for nothing if ordinary people are not involved in the problem. Thus, the plan of sustainability is proffered in this paper. REFERENCES Aufderheide, P. (2007). Documentary film; a very short introduction. Oxford University Press Aron, J., Patz, J. (2001). Ecosystem change and public health. JHU Press Burniaux, J.M. (1999). Action against climate change. OECD Publishing. DiPiazza,F. (2007). Mali in pictures. Twenty First Century Books. Gore, A., Melcher Media (2006). An Inconvenient truth. Rodale. Gottlieb, R. (2006). The Oxford handbook of religion and ecology. Oxford University Press Harris, P (2003). Global warming and East Asia. Routledge. Homepage (2007). Crop failures, food shortages and water shortages. http://www.home.att.net/thehessians/newcropreport.html Humphreys,D. (1996). Forest politics. Earthscan, London. Johnson, R. (2008). Investigating climate change. Twenty First Century Books. King, L., McCarthy,D. (2005). Environmental sociology. Rowman & Littlefield Marks, K. (2006). Global warming threatens Pacific island states. 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