Introduction
This paper focuses on the problem of global warming and climate change with the attempt of formulating a research proposal. The purpose of this work is to identify and describe this disaster and the way it affects our planet to explain why there is a need to research it.
The work will concentrate on certain aspects such as the background of the problem, the current state of the problem, the existing literature on the problem, what has already been attempted to solve the problem, what conclusions have been made, what opinions researchers have on the matter, what the central themes and arguments in the current studies on the problem are, as well as what should be added, changed or rearranged in the studies. As the foundation for developing a potential research proposal, this paper will rely on the latest scholarly, academic, and governmental articles, books, and other sources.
Background and Problem Statement
Global warming is the semi-natural disaster characterized by a continuous temperature rise on Earth that is threatening to destroy our planet. It makes droughts happen more frequently and spread wider across the continents as the sun emanates more heat. The sea level also rises as the ice caps melt due to the exceeding amount of sunlight in the Polar Regions. The winds get stronger as well; the danger of constantly reoccurring tornados and hurricanes will become less avoidable in the future.
“Historical records of precipitation, streamflow, and drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950 over many land areas. Analyses of model-simulated soil moisture, drought indices, and precipitation-minus-evaporation suggest increased risk of drought in the twenty-first century” (Dai, 2013, p. 52). According to the previous studies, sea surface drops in temperatures have a huge impact on the land precipitation level. Regional differences mostly depend on natural variations in temperatures of the tropical seas. Compiling the data, the researchers predict “severe and widespread droughts in the next 30– 90 years over many land areas resulting from either decreased precipitation and/or increased evaporation” (Dai, 2013, p. 52).
The reason why this disaster is referred to as semi-natural is in the fact that direct sun rays would not have caused so much harm if it was not for the rapidly deteriorating ozone layer. Ultraviolet radiation hardly constitutes even 1% of solar energy. The ozone layer could easily reflect this amount of radiation and protect our planet. Unfortunately, because of the copious quantities of carbon in the atmosphere, the layer starts to disintegrate, which results in the appearance of the so-called “ozone holes”.
When people burn gas, oil, coal, etc. to generate electricity, the carbon is released. The carbon-containing gases spread around the whole planet and instead of reflecting harmful sun rays they absorb them and keep them trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere creating a greenhouse effect. This is how the surface of the planet gets warmer and warmer each year. “With human-induced climate change from increased CO2 and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere – global warming – there is the strong expectation of a general increase in potential evapotranspiration that is directly related to the increase in surface heating” (Trenberth et al., 2014, p. 17).
The results are increased evaporation, more dryness, and potential evapotranspiration in plants provided an adequate amount of moisture. The major problem is in the fact that “in drought situations, part of any extra energy goes into raising temperatures, thereby amplifying warming over dry land” (Trenberth et al., 2014, p. 17). Studies report that drying “would occur in low- and mid-latitudes under increasing greenhouse gas concentrations” and spread over the whole planet (Trenberth et al., 2014, p. 17).
Wet areas will get wetter, dry areas will dry up, even more, the ecosystems will change dramatically, and animals and plants will start going extinct. If the population of the Earth does not reduce its energy consumption, the solar heat accumulating in the atmosphere will become impossible to tolerate, and all the living things on the planet will basically burn alive. It is a scary thought that, considering the speed with which the catastrophe is proceeding, it is already happening in away. The planet is slowly becoming a boiling cauldron.
The instant action people may take to slow the process down is to use less electricity, although it is much easier said than done. Not many people understand the implications of global warming. Not everyone believes that it is actually happening. This begs the conclusion that awareness must be spread, and people should be educated more on the outright deadly effects of the exceeded carbon emissions. Everybody should understand that ice melts because of their use of gasoline to fuel their cars.
Everybody should realize that the extinction of polar animals is the fault of too much coal burnt in the steam shops every year. Everybody has to come to terms with the idea that floods will happen all over the five continents (because Antarctica will have ceased to exist by that time) because right now they do not do enough to prevent and stop forest fires. Everything that can increase the carbon discharge into the atmosphere has to be dealt with – this is the message that is important to convey in this day and time (Edenhofer, 2014, p. 68). After this, it will be easier to direct attention to reducing the amount of other harmful emissions like methane and nitrous oxide (livestock and manure management, respectively) (Edenhofer, 2014).
Literature Review
The attempts at solving the problem of overtly high carbon concentration in the atmosphere have been made. The Greenpeace organization has been encouraging people to use “renewable energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal” that still can provide over 90% of usual electricity and heating (Fighting Global Warming, 2016, para. 7). Using renewable sources of energy is good both for the environment and for the economy as the industries specializing in producing geothermal, wind, and solar energies employ a lot of people. Besides, this way of production is much less expensive than, for example, the coal power industries.
The renewable energy approach also has been supported by several major companies like Google and Apple (Fighting Global Warming, 2016). They use and invest in 100% renewable energy sources, subsequently making the consumers of their products join the so-called “energy revolution”. It is not a wide-spread practice still, but people turn to better and safer energy providers thanks to these companies. Greenpeace is campaigning against the usage of coal, oil, and gas fuels trying to spread awareness.
The meetings and summits were also held to address the problem of global warming and climate change. The most noticeable example was the Earth summit in Kyoto in 2012, one of the most influential summits ever to be held on the topic of global warming and climate change (Herman, 2014). The result was outlining a protocol for carbon emissions reduction which involved “a commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 12.5% by 2012 for the EU countries” (Herman, 2014). The protocol, however, did not oblige the participating countries to sign up if they felt reluctant to, resulting in the United States not leaving their signature as well.
Numerous organizations like the UK’s Friends of the Earth have been protesting against the use of carbon-emitting sources of energy in their own way which resulted in the passing of the Climate Change Bill that will be talked about further on. Campaigns for preserving forests and saving vegetation, in general, have been conducted as the growing need for CO2 absorption has been made clearer.
Plants and trees are natural carbon reducers and have to be protected from fires and deforestation. Other ways the problem was addressed included the “stabilization wedges” approach proposed by the researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow (Global Warming Solutions: What Can We Do? 2016).
This approach represents “reducing greenhouse gas emissions from a variety of sources with technologies available in the next few decades, rather than relying on an enormous change in a single area” (Global Warming Solutions: What Can We Do? 2016, para. 5). Pacala and Socolow’s proposal is to use seven wedges for emissions reduction including the increases in wind and solar energy production and decreases in vehicle fuel energy production. The approach also encourages the production of hydrogen from renewable sources, the use of crop-produced biofuels, application of the “carbon sequestration” procedure (capturing carbon dioxide emitted from fossil fuels and keeping it underground), etc. (Global Warming Solutions: What Can We Do? 2016).
As it was said before, Friends of the Earth made the passing of the government’s climate change bill possible. In her article “What Is Being Done to Stop Climate Change?” for the Prevent Climate Change website, Kelly Fenn (2016) claims that this bill has laid the basis for the UK’s emissions policymaking the government agreed “to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 60% by 2050” (para. 6). The proposal to create an independent committee on climate change was also made.
The committee has to be “comprised of industry experts in science, energy, and technology” (Fenn, 2016, para. 7). The role of the bill was to establish the rules by which future governments have to implement their emissions policies. Apart from the 2050 program, a number of other requirements are listed on the official site of the activities such as setting “carbon budgets” (the overall statistics of the greenhouse gas emitted in the UK every five years), the establishing of the Adaptation Sub-Committee (to monitor the progress and advise on the adaptation to climate change), forming the National Adaptation Plan (assessment of risks, strategy building, and encouraging other organizations to formulate strategies of their own) (The Climate Change Act and UK Regulations, 2016). The bill was passed in 2008.
The conclusions the researchers constantly make in their articles and books are the fact that the human population of Earth should preserve plants and trees and use more energy from renewable sources. Sadly, that leads researchers and scientists to another bitter conclusion: humans did too much damage to the planet’s ecosystem just by existing: according to Chen & Tung (2014), “increasing anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions perturb Earth’s radiative equilibrium, leading to a persistent imbalance at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) despite some longwave radiative adjustment” (p. 897).
Humans consume natural resources and leave a trace of poisonous emissions behind generating greenhouse gases in the first place. It is safe to say that, no matter how much we reduce our carbon footprint, there are always going to be others who increase it again, i.e. as climate change is becoming increasingly hard to ignore, so is the problem of overpopulation: average-sized houses become bigger and consume bigger amounts of energy; suburbs grow wider and contribute to deforestation.
Some developing countries experience economic growth, which means they undergo a period of relative commercial success only now. While the developed countries switch to renewable sources of energy one by one (or at least understand the importance of it), the developing countries are lagging behind and still going through an industrialization phase which also means more carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Incidentally, these developing countries are usually the countries with the biggest population counts like China and India, as Cafaro (2012) says in his article “Climate Ethics and Population Policy” (p. 46).
While the United States is still the largest carbon emitter on the planet, the country at least realizes the shortcomings of this status and tries to change it, for example, by supporting the follow-up agreement to the Kyoto protocol, which encourages countries to reduce their emissions by up to 40% by 2020 (Herman, 2014). The CO2 levels that rise because of countries like China and India pose a serious cause for alarm as other nations’ input into reducing energy consumption simply gets canceled out (Cafaro, 2012).
While many researchers agree that formulating plans, doing campaigns, and passing the bills to spread awareness might change the situation, there is nothing they can do about the newborn population that still has to learn about and adapt to the problem. The situation becomes a vicious circle. The link between overpopulation and climate change is obvious despite the attempts of some scholars to put a damper on the issue and ignore it for the lack of proper ethical courses of action. How do we actually admit that we cannot be a part of the solution if we are the problem? How do we make other people aware of this without making it sound unethical? These are the questions that arise when the topic of overpopulation is brought up.
The current studies miss an adequate strategy of conveying the idea of overpopulation to the masses and proposing the methods of dealing with it, no matter how seemingly inhumane they might appear to common people. The gap between the wealthy and the poor nations plays a significant role as well. Basically, the ecological problem becomes the first world’s problem when the poor or developing countries are more concerned with the question of simple day-to-day survival.
The improving economy and the growing industrialization are necessary phases on the way to becoming a developed country; however, there is a glaring dilemma of bad timing: the carbon impact is already too big, and the ozone layer is much weaker than before. To be able to permit the luxury of waiting for every country to slowly reach its better days, we must live in a world where the greenhouse effect is not even a developed concept (in contrast to a disastrous phenomenon spinning out of control). These problems are much harder to solve, therefore, they deserve the scientific community’s and the world’s full attention and must be discussed in detail.
Conclusion
Saving the Earth from global warming is a tough task demanding changes in people’s perspectives. Individually everyone can do a lot, but it is going to be subverted by the future generations in the end. My research proposal is to find ways to make people get used to calling demographic growth a problem in this given situation. We should not avert our eyes from the elephant in the room.
References
Cafaro, P. (2012). Climate Ethics and Population Policy. Wires Clim Change, 3(1), 45-61.
Chen, X., & Tung, K. (2014). Varying Planetary Heat Sink Led to Global-Warming Slowdown and Acceleration. Science, 345(6199), 897-903.
Dai, A. (2013). Increasing Drought Under Global Warming in Observations and Models. Nature Climate Change, 3(2), 171-171.
Edenhofer, O. (2014). Climate Change 2014. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Fighting Global Warming. (2016). Web.
Global Warming Solutions, What Can We Do? (2016). Web.
Herman, B. (2014). The Influence of Global Warming Science Views and Sociocultural Factors on Willingness to Mitigate Global Warming. Science Education, 99(1), 1-38.
The Climate Change Act and UK Regulations. (2016). Web.
Trenberth, K., Dai, A., van der Schrier, G., Jones, P., Barichivich, J., Briffa, K., & Sheffield, J. (2014). Global Warming and Changes in Drought. Nature Climate Change, 4(1), 17-22.