Global Warming

BusinessWeek has a special report on global warming in its latest issue. It's worth the read even if you're already aware. The extent to our abuse of the planet is incredible. The article starts quite dramitically with an image of the Greenland ice sheet melting -- it's beautiful, but a terrible beauty, as it shouldn't be happening. Our CO2 emissions have been rising at an alarming level -- due primarily to our burning of fossil fuels and oil. For 450,000 years, the CO2 levels in the atmosphere has stayed below 290ppm -- today we spew more than 7 gigatons of CO2 into the air, putting the levels at more than 370ppm. Correspondingly, there has been a steady rise in global temperature.
BusinessWeek Magazine image.
The World (or most of the world anyway) have bought into the fact that we're made a mess of our planet, and are in the process of a vast terraforming experiment. The world banded together and in 1992 opened the Kyoto protocol for signatures -- it was entered into force by the UN in 1994. Thus far, only 124 countries have signed on [PDF] -- alarmingly, some of the leading nations of the world have refused to -- including the United States -- mostly because the Bush administration, and George W. himself, thinks the whole thing is a farce. Thankfully, most Americans don't share Bush's ideals of screwing the world. The states are starting to adopt stringent laws to enforce emission control -- and surprisingly, businesses are starting to wake up and realize that there's money to be made from saving the world -- indeed, lowering CO2 emissions is turning out to save millions of dollars [PDF]. It's a sad state of human affairs, when our very survival depends on how cost effective it is for us to be proactive. If we continue this way, I can forsee a day when some visitors passing by from another world will stop by to read the epitaph we've left on our dead Earth: "Here lies the remains of the human race. We died of our own stupidity."
Related links:
  • The Climate Group
  • Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
  • Pew Center on Global Climate Change
  • The Earth Institute at Columbia University
  • Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
  • Resouces for the Future
  • MIT Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
  • EPRI: Science & Technology solutions for the global energy industry
  • Global Warming and Climate Change Policy Websites

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