quaist

As the signs that the Earth is warming up become more apparent every day, the issue of global warming has reached a point where there is almost complete consensus that it is a reality requiring some urgent solutions.

Scientific evidence shows the Earth's temperature has risen in the past 100 years.

Most of the warming has taken place in the past 20 years, indicating acceleration in the process. It is now also widely accepted that most of the warming in the past 50 years can be attributed to human activities.

'A free ride'
Global warming will be one of the subjects at the CSIR's stand at the International Science, Innovation and Technology Exhibition, hosted by the Department of Science and Technology at the Sandton Convention Centre in Gauteng from September 24 to 27.

The awareness of the need to bring it under control is growing rapidly.

The acting vice-president of sustainable development for the World Bank, Steen Jorgensen, told the Global Environment Facility conference in Cape Town last month: "There is clear evidence that governments and people in developing countries consider the sound management of natural resources a vital part of their development strategies."

He said it was a myth that the protection of the environment and resources was "a luxury of rich countries".

Jorgensen said there was a growing consensus globally that natural resources were the key to economic growth and fighting poverty in developing countries.

'Enormous amounts of money'
At the same conference, the executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Achim Steiner, said the problem of climate change and global warming was becoming increasingly serious.

"It's beginning to cost enormous amounts of money," he said.

Last month, the World Bank released a document on managing climate risk, indicating it was taking the hazards associated with climatic change seriously. In the document, it proposes how to alleviate the effects of global warming before they become catastrophic.

"Climate change is taking place, and further changes are inevitable," said the World Bank's Environment Facility Programme in the document.

"The impacts result not only from gradual changes in temperature and sea level, but also from increased climate variability and extremes, including intense flooding, droughts and storms," it said.

The CSIR's Dr Bob Scholes says the long-term effects of climate change associated with global warming are beginning to sink in.

"There seems to be consensus among scientists that, if allowed to continue unabated, global warming will result in the end of life - or at least the end of life as we know it," he said.

But he said there were people who still argued that Earth would take care of the problem itself.

Scholes said this was partially true, as oceans and ecosystems on land did have the capacity to take up the harmful carbon dioxide build-ups in the atmosphere. But this could not go on forever - there were already signs that the acidity levels in the oceans were rising.

"This hinders the metabolism of microscopic marine organisms that build their shells from of calcium carbonate - the process that helps the ocean to keep on sucking up carbon dioxide," Scholes warned.

He said it had been calculated that Earth's capacity to soak up carbon dioxide could be depleted within the next century.

"Its all well to say: 'Leave it to nature to take care of the problem'. Nature will deal with the problem, but it is under no obligation to deal with it to our liking," he said.

Scholes said among some of the novel approaches to the problems caused by carbon dioxide build-up was to place a value on carbon and allow it to be traded between countries that have emissions under the requirements of the Kyoto Protocol and those that exceed them.

He proposed that countries with the capacity to deal with carbon dioxide build-up should be compensated for "mopping up" the emissions produced by large industrialised countries.

Scholes said if this system were to be feasible it would require clear identification of these "carbon sinks", many of which were located in Africa, and a calculation of their capacity to process carbon.

Similar studies have shown that the idea of returning the carbon from excess carbon dioxide to the Earth is not as far-fetched as first thought.

In 2004, Kevin Harrison, an assistant professor at Boston College's Geology and Geophysics Department, published research showing that carbon dioxide soil fertilisation could be used to measure an ecosystem's ability to store carbon in response to carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

Harrison's research is believed to have major implications for scientists studying ways of countering global climate change. It shows that carbon dioxide fertilisation may be slowing down the expected accumulation of carbon dioxide by increasing carbon accumulation in terrestrial vegetation and soil.

Scholes said solving the global warming problem was a complex and difficult problem.

He said that although strides were being made in the areas of mitigation (reducing or controlling carbon dioxide output) and adaptation (finding suitable responses to the build-up of harmful emissions), at the heart of the problem was how the developed world worked.

"Energy lies at the core of all economic systems and it is the need for producing energy that results in carbon dioxide emissions. It is difficult to impose restrictions on some countries while others take a free ride and refuse to acknowledge them," he said.

He pointed at the US, which has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but is the largest producer of carbon dioxide in the world.

He said it was unlikely that this would change in the short term while the United States had problems such as the Iraq War and the reconstruction of the areas destroyed last year by Hurricane Katrina to contend with.

IOL

elisheva

quaist, we had a discussion on global warming and environment issues running here in case you want to peek back and read that

mark777

we have to make sure we have the right cause though...

cooldivya

... Provoking increased evil on earth.

elisheva

Please post on existing threads rather than on old or redundant ones, mark777 and cooldivya. We already have a global warming thread, as I mentioned in my post above, so I'll close this one.