Humans and Global warming
Most of us have heard about global warming and how it is slowly chewing away into the life of our beloved mother earth, about how it has caused several noticeable changes in the weather patterns due to climate change resulting from the emission of green house gases. It has raised some environmental issues as well, both directly and indirectly from the pollution of these green house gases, be it from the rising sea levels due to the increased in the earth’s surface temperature or the susceptibility of the our health factor due to the irregular heat and cold exposure.
Doing our part, is it enough?
Some of us are doing our part to help the environment through various means from recycling our recyclable products, changing our wasteful habits to installing solar panels and harnessing wind power as an alternative source of energy for our house. Some big corporation and major industries are doing their part as well by promoting and sponsoring awareness campaigns, making sure their waste discharge, by products and their gas emission abide and comply by the health regulatory boards. These discharges go through several processes to be classified as environmentally friendly before being discharge and released into the environment. Some of them have also implemented various tactics, methods and technology to reduce their energy and resources usage. From installing water saving devices to researching new technologies to reduce carbon emission, all these in an effort to reduce our carbon emission the release of more greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.
Renewable energies
Self sustaining and renewable energy sources holds great promises for a greener and cleaner future. Harnessing nature’s forces for our benefits such building dams, wind driven turbines and thermal generator to utilize geysers are just few of the examples. The latest technology introduce into the scene is the ability to be able to harness the energies of waves to generate electricity. Man kind are so desperately seeking alternatives for sources of renewable energy as each passing day we are pushing the supply limits of our natural gas and fossil fuels to the brink of extinction. The supply and demand balance will soon tip greatly as our supplies of energy continue to deplete and individual countries continues to increase their energy consumption.
Taking Turkey as a case study, Kaygusuz (2007) reported that the country have shown energy increased in energy consumption at an average of 4.3% annually since 1990. In comparison to its increased energy usage, its carbon dioxide emission has also whooped up to an alarming figure of 193 million tons in the year 2003. Multiply the figure with all the developed and developing countries and then we fast tracked it 10 years down the road. It is no longer a surprise that we our fossil fuels supplies will be facing depletion sooner then predicted by the experts.
We are to blame?
Are ‘we’ humans really to blame for the rise in the global temperature and the current condition of mother earth. We would question ourselves as we observe for the past few years as headlines in the news showcase stories of cities and countries being hit by early frost, late frost, sudden blitz, ice storms and hail storms. Notice are sometimes displayed and to alert people to prepare and brace themselves with the coming of snow storms, cyclones and many more of such similar examples. This can be used as environmental indicators and evidence as to how distorted our weather patterns have gone. At present carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are the main Green house gases deemed to be the culprits behind global warming.
However there are several ideologies out there calcimining that this is part of a natural cycle. They explain that as we see the trend in the rise of the global temperature for the past few centuries and how they have declined in recent times. Maybe that explains the unexpected surges in late and early frost. Be it if it’s a natural cycle or that we are to be blamed for contributing to the Earth’s environmental degradation, we as the planets inhabitants have a role and responsibility to sustain it for our future generation and the many other inhabitants that we share this planet with. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the Gaia is sick.