SPECIAL. ENVIRONMENT 
Trade December 22, 2009
The emissions problems are not new, dating from the nineteenth century. Already there was talk of their harmful effects on our planet
By: Thomas Unger Despite campaigns financed by interests linked to oil, the world can no longer ignore climate change. The Copenhagen meeting served to try to quantify the cost, both adaptation and mitigation. Adapting means, for example, to protect coastal populations of rising ocean levels. Mitigation involves reducing emissions of greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Both actions have a cost.
The adaptation will be spending more in poor countries and mitigation in rich countries. China, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, on the one side facing the consequences of poor country, but should also take measures to mitigate rich country. Major emitters: China, U.S. and the European Union must agree on the account and how the divide. Everyone knows that the bill will amount to hundreds of billions, to recapitulate the history, indications are that this cost could be reduced, if not avoided.
EARLY WARNINGS
Al beginning of the nineteenth century the world population reached the first billion in industrial revolution whose fuel was coal. In 1824, when the big chimneys were a symbol of progress, the famous French physicist Joseph Fourier * described the greenhouse effect: "The Earth's temperature can be increased by the interposition of gases in the atmosphere, because heat as light is less strength to penetrate the heat to go. " Several scientists addressed the issue, but it was the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius who in 1896 warned that the industrial era, with its massive combustion of coal, would cause a "greenhouse bill human "and calculated the increase in degrees per doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Arrhenius figures are surprisingly close to those calculated today. Four years later, another Swede, Knut Angstrom ** found that, under certain conditions, even traces of strongly absorb CO2 from the infrared radiation. In 1927, the death Arrhenius, CO2 emissions from fossil fuels reached one billion tons and two billion world population.
Swedish physicist's comments did not go unnoticed by an English engineer and inventor, who compiled data on more than one hundred and forty stations around the world, to show that global temperature was rising. From 1938 until 1964, when he died, Guy Callendar wrote 25 scientific papers to warn about global warming, called Callender effect was ignored by meteorologists.
AWARENESS
In 1955, Canadian physicist Gilbert Norman Plass used the work of Callender. Plass, who worked at the universities of Harvard, Princeton and Texas A & M, estimated the impact of greenhouse gases. According to his calculations, a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere would raise global temperatures between 3 ° C and 4 ° C. Meanwhile, the physicist D. Designed Keeling and installed on Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and Antarctica, a device for measuring the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. The observatory, which runs until today, was the first to show an increase in the gas. In parallel, the Earth's population reached three billion.
Shortly after the death of President Kennedy, a group of scientists presented to President Johnson a document that describes global warming as an issue really worrying. Spend seven years to the Environment Conference 1972 in Stockholm, which gives priority to other issues but created the Program of United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP. Three years later the population the planet reaches four billion and five billion in 1987.
Meanwhile, a group of scientists and meteorologists began to join forces to study the phenomena observed. Dr. Wallace Smith Broecker, Department of Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, New York, published a paper on global warming. The term is. Later, concerns about the hole in the ozone layer results in 1988 the Montreal Protocol, successfully faced the challenge of HCC (chlorofluorocarbons), ozone destroyers. IPCC
A KYOTO
From Montreal, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and UNEP create the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The following year, 1989, fossil fuel emissions reach six billion tonnes. A year later, the IPCC published its first report confirming global warming and predicted an increase. In 1992 he conducted the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Earth Summit, with the participation of 172 countries. They take various agreements that ultimately did not commit.
Three years later, the IPCC produced its second report that claims responsibility for the climate change directly to human activity. It also confirms the warming figures, extrapolations and make projections. This results in the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1977 by 187 countries except the United States at that time responsible for 36.1% of emissions. Other developed countries commit to reduce its emissions by 5% between 2008 and 2012. The millennium ends with six billion inhabitants.
THE NEW MILLENNIUM
The third IPCC report, submitted in 2001, is more categorical in their statements and more pessimistic in their projections. Provide projections on which preventive measures are not taken, the warming in the second half of the century may have catastrophic consequences. While the Kyoto Protocol becomes law in the signatory countries, see a 700-page document on global warming, commissioned by the British government economist Nicholas Stern. The report provides a detailed analysis of the consequences of warming and calculates its cost: 20% of global gross domestic product, stop it would cost 1%. Similarly
2006, emissions from the combustion of hydrocarbons reach eight billion tons. The following year the IPCC confirms his claims and receives, with Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. The same year there is a meeting in Indonesia, which adopted the Bali accords, to prepare a commitment preceding Copenhagen. Meanwhile, the devices made by David Keeling at Mauna Loa and Antarctica show that the concentration in the atmosphere has risen from 315 parts per million (ppm) to 380 ppm. By then Tony Blair, in his capacity as chairman of the G-8 and EU, has declared climate change a top priority for the European Union.
THE SITUATION TODAY
A total of 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen and the result is not yet clear who will do what, and above all who is going to pay. What is clear, at least for me and representatives of 192 countries, is that climate change is a reality that threatens a string of natural disasters affecting the Third World begin and then to those causing the first. What worries me, though I will not be to see the results, is that many of those now making decisions, nor will to suffer the consequences.
(*) Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier (1768-1830) is famous for its decomposition of periodic functions in so-called Fourier series.
(**) Angström Knut Johan (1857-1910) was the son of Anders Jonas Angström (1814-1874) and in whose honor was established to measure atomic scale (1 Å = 10-10 m).
0 comments:
Post a Comment