Login with your Facebook Account
Increase in the global average surface temperature resulting from enhancement of the greenhouse effect, primarily by air pollution. In 2007 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forecasted that by 2100 global average surface temperatures would increase 3.27.2 °F (1.84.0 °C), depending on a range of scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, and stated that it was now 90 percent certain that most of the warming observed over the previous half century could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions produced by human activities (i.e., industrial processes and transportation). Many scientists predict that such an increase in temperature would cause polar ice caps and mountain glaciers to melt rapidly, significantly raising the levels of coastal waters, and would produce new patterns and extremes of drought and rainfall, seriously disrupting food production in certain regions. Other scientists maintain that such predictions are overstated. The 1992 Earth Summit and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change attempted to address the issue of global warming, but in both cases the efforts were hindered by conflicting national economic agendas and disputes between developed and developing nations over the cost and consequences of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
© 2010 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
|
Originally Posted by Periergeia
He is almost speaking the truth. We are not getting off oil any time soon. Natural gas, though, is not better, either. It merely replaces one dying fuel source with another.
As far as goods to the "department store" are concerned, that's the easier part of the equation. Transportation will become more expensive, and the result will be that there will be less and smarter transportation. We can probably cut our energy demand for moving goods to a third or a quarter and still get all the goods we NEED to the stores. That simply means we won't be driving fully inflated children's bouncing castles around as we used to (just look at the average density of the throw-away toys that you we buy by the millions around Christmas time) but we will focus on densely packaged goods of actual economic value e.g. foods, clothing and industrial machinery. But that is truly the easy part of the equation. The hard part is moving people around. The US has neglected energy efficient infrastructure for almost a century now and it will take a major restructuring of our inner cities and suburbs to make significant changes. As part of these efforts we will be destroying existing real estate valued in the trillions to replace low density housing with higher density quarters and to reshuffle purely residential and purely industrial neighborhoods into mixed models like they have in Europe and Asia. As unpopular as this sounds, there is no other way to become competitive in the 21st century. Some communities have found this out the hard way, already, and are scrambling to restructure, others have decided to become the new ghost towns. |
