The Global Oven
When I look at today’s hot issue of global warming, I get a feeling that we are all in a giant airplane, crashing down into the ground and everyone is arguing about who gets the window seats..!
Since the beginning of the previous century, the environment is getting worse, and so little is done to recover it. In the contrary, our dependence on harmful technologies grows stronger while the earth is getting warmer and many ecosystems and endangered species are being threatened to extinction. I won’t point fingers and start blaming certain entities for this matter in this article, for that won’t lead us anywhere. Instead, I’ll shed a light on what to do, or where to start to ease the pain that the earth is suffering because of this dilemma.
Climate Change and the Greenhouse effect
To understand how to fight global warming, we should first understand how it came into being. In other words, what are the reasons behind it? Is it something new or is it a cyclic behavior that nature does to balance things out?
As many knows, the earth atmosphere is kept warm by a combination of certain gases along with the water vapor that exist in the earth atmosphere which (among other factors) helps the earth from solar radiation and keep it warm enough to sustain life. The process in which these gases circulate and stay in the atmosphere is called the “greenhouse effect”. Now, this is not bad by itself, in fact, the greenhouse effect is what keeping the world warm enough to be inhabitable, however, since the industrial revolution, humans have been hammering the atmosphere with substances that increase the percentages and concentrations of some of the greenhouse gases (like CO2, N2O and Methane) causing the atmosphere to absorb more heat and holdup the natural cooling off, resulting in “a significant man-made increase in the earth's climatic temperature over quite a short period of time” and that is what we now call “Global Warming”. Some might not think of this as a serious matter, few scientists (whom ideas are not shared by the overall scientists around the world) think that this is a natural behavior of the earth and the earth is recovering from a period called the “Little Ice Age” (that started in the 13th century and ended at the beginning of the 19th century) when the world witnessed a significant drop in the average temperature of the atmosphere specially in the northern hemisphere of the earth. However this idea was rejected by many scientific organizations as well as individual scientists and climate change experts bearing in mind that it would take the earth thousands of years to “naturally” cool down or warm up just one Celsius degree and over the last 100 years the earth’s average atmosphere temperature increased 0.74 degrees. Moreover, the warming trend of the last 50 years is nearly double that of the last 100 years. Bearing all that in mind, we will start to realize the grave seriousness of this issue.
The Kyoto Protocol
The international community has been so hectic and active regarding this issue. One of the major steps taken on that level was signing the Kyoto treaty. Over 175 countries have signed the “Kyoto Protocol” which is an agreement under which industrialized countries will reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990. The UAE signed this protocol on November 2005.
UAE and CO2 emissions
The latest reports from the CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) for the U.N. shows that the UAE is ranked 29th among the world’s most CO2 emitters producing 0.5% of the total CO2 emissions, however, we are ranked 3rd among CO2 emitters per capita (per head). In common terminology, compared to other countries we are emitting way more CO2 than what we should. And if you really think of it, it makes sense somehow because about 80% of our country is a mere desert and one factor that gets into the calculations of these “emissions per capita” is forestation and deforestation, because trees and forests help reducing the CO2 concentrations in the air. Also, I might add (and this is totally a viewpoint, not a fact) that the level of awareness toward this issue here in the country is so law, which makes people tend to over-use electricity or not using recycled and environment-friendly products.
We have to ask ourselves: how many times do we use our cars unnecessarily? How many times do we keep the TV on? Or the lights switched on? How many papers do uselessly print out? How about our consumable products? Where do they go after we are done with them? After we find the answers to these little questions, I’m sure we’ll find out that we are contributing heavily in harming the environment. But, at the end, there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel; this means we can change this situation by being more aware to the matter at hand. To be environmentally cautious costs us nothing, instead we can save the world.
I’d like to end this article with a quote from an unknown author; “Nobody can go back and a start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending”.
Since the beginning of the previous century, the environment is getting worse, and so little is done to recover it. In the contrary, our dependence on harmful technologies grows stronger while the earth is getting warmer and many ecosystems and endangered species are being threatened to extinction. I won’t point fingers and start blaming certain entities for this matter in this article, for that won’t lead us anywhere. Instead, I’ll shed a light on what to do, or where to start to ease the pain that the earth is suffering because of this dilemma.
Climate Change and the Greenhouse effect
To understand how to fight global warming, we should first understand how it came into being. In other words, what are the reasons behind it? Is it something new or is it a cyclic behavior that nature does to balance things out?
As many knows, the earth atmosphere is kept warm by a combination of certain gases along with the water vapor that exist in the earth atmosphere which (among other factors) helps the earth from solar radiation and keep it warm enough to sustain life. The process in which these gases circulate and stay in the atmosphere is called the “greenhouse effect”. Now, this is not bad by itself, in fact, the greenhouse effect is what keeping the world warm enough to be inhabitable, however, since the industrial revolution, humans have been hammering the atmosphere with substances that increase the percentages and concentrations of some of the greenhouse gases (like CO2, N2O and Methane) causing the atmosphere to absorb more heat and holdup the natural cooling off, resulting in “a significant man-made increase in the earth's climatic temperature over quite a short period of time” and that is what we now call “Global Warming”. Some might not think of this as a serious matter, few scientists (whom ideas are not shared by the overall scientists around the world) think that this is a natural behavior of the earth and the earth is recovering from a period called the “Little Ice Age” (that started in the 13th century and ended at the beginning of the 19th century) when the world witnessed a significant drop in the average temperature of the atmosphere specially in the northern hemisphere of the earth. However this idea was rejected by many scientific organizations as well as individual scientists and climate change experts bearing in mind that it would take the earth thousands of years to “naturally” cool down or warm up just one Celsius degree and over the last 100 years the earth’s average atmosphere temperature increased 0.74 degrees. Moreover, the warming trend of the last 50 years is nearly double that of the last 100 years. Bearing all that in mind, we will start to realize the grave seriousness of this issue.
The Kyoto Protocol
The international community has been so hectic and active regarding this issue. One of the major steps taken on that level was signing the Kyoto treaty. Over 175 countries have signed the “Kyoto Protocol” which is an agreement under which industrialized countries will reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990. The UAE signed this protocol on November 2005.
UAE and CO2 emissions
The latest reports from the CDIAC (Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center) for the U.N. shows that the UAE is ranked 29th among the world’s most CO2 emitters producing 0.5% of the total CO2 emissions, however, we are ranked 3rd among CO2 emitters per capita (per head). In common terminology, compared to other countries we are emitting way more CO2 than what we should. And if you really think of it, it makes sense somehow because about 80% of our country is a mere desert and one factor that gets into the calculations of these “emissions per capita” is forestation and deforestation, because trees and forests help reducing the CO2 concentrations in the air. Also, I might add (and this is totally a viewpoint, not a fact) that the level of awareness toward this issue here in the country is so law, which makes people tend to over-use electricity or not using recycled and environment-friendly products.
We have to ask ourselves: how many times do we use our cars unnecessarily? How many times do we keep the TV on? Or the lights switched on? How many papers do uselessly print out? How about our consumable products? Where do they go after we are done with them? After we find the answers to these little questions, I’m sure we’ll find out that we are contributing heavily in harming the environment. But, at the end, there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel; this means we can change this situation by being more aware to the matter at hand. To be environmentally cautious costs us nothing, instead we can save the world.
I’d like to end this article with a quote from an unknown author; “Nobody can go back and a start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending”.
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