There is a lot of talk about the environment these days. It is clear that the majority of scientists and people agree that our life style is destroying the environment, natural habitat of many species including us. There are still a couple of skeptics that argue that the climate change is not a human made problem and it is a natural phenomena similar to what happened millions of years ago right before the ice age.
So, how can we calculate what is causing the problem? We all know how hot out car engines can get, and we can estimate how many cars there are in the entire world and then we can estimate how much extra energy is that dumping into the air everyday. That is a lower bound, if ignore all other sources of energy waste such as giant companies and factories.
OK, the skeptic would tell you: “It is true that we are burning fossil fuel everyday, but lots of this excess heat can escape the air into the space can’t it? The sun is shining much more energy into the earth. Orders of magnitude larger than the man made energy as a matter of fact.”
This second argument is also true. The problem is much more complicated than this. Every second a lot of energy enters the earth and escapes the earth. The equilibrium between the energy and how this energy is flowing is what is causing the huge climate change. The reality is that 1 or 2 degrees increase in the average temperature wouldn’t be such a big deal if the energy flow didn’t have consequences. The excess energy that we burn comes with lots of pollutant such as CO2. CO2 blocks the reflection of the energy outward. Imagine you are sitting in your car in a hot summer day and the windows are closed. That is what is happening to us. We are suffocating in our manmade blocks of the windows.
On top of this the melting of the arctic ice is releasing excess CO2 that is being buried by the nature to cool down the earth in the ice age. This means that the more we release CO2 the more the earth will by itself. We are closing to a point that the CO2 release can not be controlled anymore. If two years from now we emit ZERO levels of CO2 we still can’t go back to the medieval times. The system is running out of control and there is not much that we can do. As a matter of fact some people are reaching the point that they are proposing reversing effect such as building huge mirrors in arctic to imitate the reflection of the sun light by the ice.
This is not just a scary story. There are a lot of measurements, theories and calculations that back this up. The only few scientist that still don’t believe the devastating environment change are those funded by the oil companies trying to destroy our last resources on earth. Jim Anderson from Harvard University says “I don’t like to call it global warming, because that implies a slow, manageable change in the average temperature of the earth” and that is not what is happening. The planet’s feedback from our actions is driving it into dooms and if we don’t take action in the next 2-3 years, it will be completely irreversible.
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