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THE PROBLEM:
Global warming is here, like it or not, and
it looks like, according to virtually all of the world's top scientists, that we
humans are the major source of the problem, primarily due to our
addiction to fossil fuels. For centuries we've been burning abundant coal,
oil and gas and pumping carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere faster than the plants and the oceans can soak
them up. Our atmosphere's level of carbon dioxide is now higher than it has
been for hundreds of thousands of years, and global temperatures are rising
faster now than at any time in the past thousand years. Since 1850, average
global temperatures have risen about .6 degrees Celsius according to the
United Nations.
A statement made recently
by Jeffrey Severinghaus, a geoscience researcher at the Scripps
Institute of Oceanography sums it all up "There is no doubt that humans
are warming the planet. That's very clear now. The data is beautiful.
It's very strong. Humans are changing the climate, and we're expected to
change it a lot more in the future." There is considerable debate among
the scientific community on the degree and severity of the change but
the consensus is that it is coming, and now is the time to take action
to prevent the worst possible scenarios from happening.
According to a recent CNN
article about global warming, no one knows exactly how, when or where
global warming will play out. And in diplomatic circles, the "who" and
"what" may be the most significant, as in which countries -citizens and
companies alike -will bear the greatest burdens to control greenhouse
gas emissions. But there is no doubt it will take a concerted global
effort of citizens, companies and governments to stop the run away train
before it is too late.
For more information about
the problem of global warming check out the following websites:
Focus The Nation -Global Warming Solutions For America
CICERO -Center For International Climate and Environmental Research
Union of Concerned Scientists -Global Warming
Global Warming -Early Warning
Signs
EPA -Global Warming
Just For Kids
National
Resources Defense Council -Global Warming
Sierra Club -Global
Warming and Energy
EcoBridge -The Present Danger of Global Warming
 GREENHOUSE GASES
The culprit is excess greenhouse gases produced by human activity.
Greenhouse gases include such naturally occurring and man-made impounds
as methane, carbon dioxide, water vapor and nitrous oxide, while others
are exclusively human-made (gases used for instance in aerosols). These
gases allow sunlight to penetrate the earth's atmosphere freely but when
some of it is reflected back towards space as infrared radiation (heat)
they trap this heat in the atmosphere, thereby causing global warming.
And the major greenhouse gases are carbon dioxide emissions, resulting
from petroleum and natural gas consumption, including automobiles. Fossil fuel consumption represents 82
percent total United States human-made greenhouse gas emissions.
For more information about greenhouse gases check out the following
websites:
United States Environmental Protection Agency article on greenhouse
gases
eia.doe.gov article on greenhouse gases
THE KYOTO PROTOCOL:
The recent implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, an
international accord which went into effect of February 2005, is
designed to reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses being released into
the atmosphere to reduce global warming, is a first step on an
international level to curb the problem. More than 140 nations signed on
to the treaty but the world's largest greenhouse gas producer, the
United States, did not. Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky cited
the reason was an unfair burden that would affect the United States
economic and business community. However, in spite of this self serving
behavior, even with perfect compliance, the treaty would lead to only a
2 percent cut in greenhouse gases, far short of the 50 percent deemed
necessary by scientists to avert a crisis of planetary proportions in
the next fifty to one hundred years. Irregardless, even though the
treaty expires in 2012 and the gain is small, it still is an
important first step and opens the door to larger actions by the
international community.
The protocol sets binding
greenhouse gas limits on 38 industrialized nations and establishes
procedures such as "emissions trading" in which a country having trouble
meeting its requirements can buy credits from others that exceed them.
Another 106 signatories do not have mandatory requirements, but
participate in the process and have incentives to curb emissions.
For information about the Kyoto Protocol check out the following
websites:
The United Nations Framework
Convention On Climate Change: The Kyoto Protocol 2005
Text of The Kyoto Protocol
Kyoto Protocol: PEW Center For Global Climate Change
GEO-SIGNS:
The following is a partial list of
"geo-signs", from an excellent article on Global Warming in the September
2004 issue of National Geographic, that give an indication of just how
extensive the problem is:
- When President Taft created
Glacier National Park in 1910, there were 150 glaciers. Today there are
only 30 left and most of those have shrunk in area by two-thirds. It is
predicted that within the next 30 years, if things continue as they are,
most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear.
- The world's oceans are heating
up from the top down. Researcher from the Scripps Institute of
Oceanography have found that the world's six ocean basins show a .5
degree Celsius increase since the 1940's in a pattern that could only be
explained by human-induced warming.
- The snows on Mount Kilimanjaro
have melted more than 80% since 1912, the glaciers in the Himalayas in
India are retreating so fast that most of the central and eastern ones
could disappear by 2035, artic ice has thinned greatly over the past 50
years and Greenland's massive ice sheet is shrinking.
- Spring freshwater ice breakup
in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than it did 150
years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later, and thawing permafrost
has caused the ground to subside more than 15 feet in parts of Alaska.
- Linked directly to melting ice
around the world, the rate of global sea level rise has departed from
the average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is rising
more rapidly at an alarming rate, with grave implications for low lying
coastal areas around the world, since never before hat so many humans
lived so close to the coasts. More than a hundred million people
worldwide live within three mean feet of sea level.
- The
Adelie Penguins of Antarctic Peninsula numbered 2,800 breeding pairs
twenty years ago. Today the number has dropped to about 1,000. The cause
is rising winter temperatures which have shrunk the sea ice, depriving
the Adelies of an important feeding platform from which they hunt krill.
- birds breed an average of nine days earlier than in the mid-20th
century, frogs mate up to seven weeks. Changes in the patterns of animal
species the world over that are due to global warming include tree swallows in North
American migrate north in the spring 12 days earlier than they did
twenty five years ago, and red foxes in Canada are shifting their ranges
hundreds of miles toward the North Pole, moving into the territories of
Artic Foxes. And the list goes on and on.....
- Rising average ocean
temperatures are causing longer and more frequent bleaching episodes
that are fatal to some corals.
CAP AND TRADE -One Of The Solutions
a
"cap and trade'' program is a legislative program to give American
companies a financial incentive to reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions.
The program
first would set a limit, or cap, on total carbon dioxide emissions
allowed within the United States.Permits then would be issued that give
companies the right to emit a certain amount of global warming pollution
into the atmosphere. Those permits would allow less and less pollution
as time goes by, reducing total emission levels by more than 65 percent
by 2050.Companies initially would be given a percentage of emission
credits for free by the federal government, a provision many
environmentalists don't like. Companies would have to buy more credits
if they didn't come up with ways to increase their energy efficiency and
reduce their global warming pollution.
The credits would be
created and monitored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which
would issue them to regulated companies, states and a climate change
credit corporation that would sell them at auction. Proceeds from the
auction would be used in part to help develop clean energy
technology.Companies would be free to buy, sell, bank and trade permits
to gain enough credits to comply with the law. A company able to
increase its energy efficiency or convert to cleaner technology would
end up with extra credits it could sell to a company that has not
achieved those goals. The idea is that the sale would reward the first
company for reducing its emissions and give the second company a
financial incentive to do the same.The program would not tell polluting
companies how to reduce their emissions. It would leave it up to them to
come up with a method that is most cost-effective for them.Failing to
take action would be costly. If companies violated emission levels set
by their permits, they could face fines of up to $25,000 a day.The "cap
and trade'' approach is not a new idea, although it has never been
implemented on the scale envisioned by this bill. The plan is modeled
after a successful system created in the early 1990s to reduce acid rain
in the eastern United States.
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