Mitigation Plan for Global Warming

Mitigation Plan for Global Warming

The scientific world noticed the signs of global warming since the early stages of its manifestations through climate changes. Differences in the global temperature that were believed to have manifested thorough geological ages in only fractions of Celsius degrees seemed to speed up to a point never registered since the Ice Age. The Industrial revolution and the drastic and irreversible changes it brought in human activities as well as the increase in the world population and the extension of agricultural activities led to an exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions that were no longer in balance with the storing capacities of our planet. According to Nicholas Herbert Stern, "there is a compelling evidence that the rising levels of greenhouse gases will have a warming effect on the climate through increasing the amount of infrared radiation (heat energy) trapped by the atmosphere" "the green house effect"…Current levels of greenhouse levels are higher now than at any time in at least the past 650,000 years"

The effects of climate change experienced during the last decades at a global level are no longer subject to ignoring or denying and scientists and communities alike are more and more preoccupied with finding solution of mitigating global warming. The first steps that were already taken were to make the public aware of the threats global poses even on short-term. Hurricanes like Katrina, floods and the rapid melting of various glaciers are becoming an almost constant presence in the news and there is no doubt that there are urgent measures to be taken and conjugated efforts of scientists, economists, communities and the international cooperation between countries are necessary in order to come up with viable plans that are realistic and well thought in order to find solutions to reduce the green house gas emissions.

Environmentalists present models of climate changes at a global level that are showing a rise of between 2 and 5 Celsius degrees during the next twenty to fifty years. These are to be caused by the general doubling of the emissions of greenhouse gasses, compared to the pre-industrial era

Stern, like many of his predecessors, emphasizes the influence human activities in the past three hundred years have had on the climate of our planet and the importance of altering and adapting these activities to the point where the climate changes produce irreversible effects and even endanger the very existence of the human race. The main cause for the thickening of the layer of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere is the CO2. The burning of fossil fuels that is extensively utilized for the production of energy world wide is the factor that helps nations to evolve, but it is at the same time the most negative factor that influences the global warming due to the increase in gas emissions. David G. Victor points out that in the 1990s, "the central challenge for global warming policy was simply to make indus-trial managers, government officials, and the public aware of the dangers," while at the beginning of 2000 the focus from awareness that abounds toward "the main impediment to action": "the lack of a viable architecture for international cooperation."

In 2007, international cooperation is already set in motion, but the means to find viable solutions, create programs and policies that are both realistic and able to make a smooth transition in economies that are highly dependent on sources of energy that are highly dependent on the burning of fossil fuels are still difficult to find and even more difficult to implement at such large scales. The burning of fossil fuels, accompanied by an aggressive deforestation are continuing to encourage the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the earth's atmosphere, causing the heating of the planet's surface at a speeding pace. Predictions in scientific terms are hard to be made, but the scientists are certain that human activities contribute to an essential degree to the global warming and the numbers are indicating that the records in high temperatures have been reached during the last two decades.

Governments are aware that the sources of energy that account for the major cause of greenhouse gas emissions due to human activities need to go through transformations and changes in order to reduce these to a level that will allow scientific researches to hope for numbers that will show a decrease in the pace global warming is showing right now. According to the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States, the main human activities causing the emissions of greenhouse gasses in the U.S. are: "transportation, electricity production, industry, agriculture and forestry"

among others. All aspects of life are affected by the global warming effects. Scientists, researchers and environmentalists point out that transformations due to climate changes are sizable everywhere without much difficulty: "sea level rise, shrinking glaciers, changes in the range and distribution of plants and animals, trees blooming earlier, lengthening of growing seasons, ice on rivers and lakes freezing later and breaking up earlier, and thawing of permafrost."

The efforts of environmentalists are necessarily accompanied by those economists in the process of creating and implementing programs and policies destined to change human activities at a national as well as an individual level. In his report, Stern addresses the debates that occurred in the scientific world over the credibility of results based on comparison between temperature ranges throughout the centuries and even Millennia. No doubt that actual records of global temperatures are only available during the last one and a half century, but nevertheless, as Stern pinpoints, the fact that greenhouse gasses accumulate and have a negative impact on the warming of the planet are indisputable conclusions, based on actual statistics and according to physics and chemistry

The actions taken at the international level taken during the last two decades started with the setting up of a work frame for the international cooperation through the Framework Convention on Climate Change, adopted in 1992 at the "Earth Summit," in Rio.

Further, the Kyoto Protocol bound thirty eight nations to monitor their levels of greenhouse gas emissions and implement policies that were destined to reduce them on a period of the next ten to fifteen years to an average ranging between 8% in the European Union and 6% in Japan, compared to the levels registered in 1990.

As Victor underlines in his analysis of the international efforts taken before 2001, some of the major pollutants among which the U.S., Canada and Japan, already exceeded the levels of gas emissions they produced in the 1990s and a viable policy that could become viable and effectively change their level of pollution in the sector of greenhouse gas emissions is much more costly and difficult to implement and manage than previously thought. In the end, everything comes down to the economics. The main flaw of the Kyoto protocol was, according to Victor, the vagueness of most of the details involving the emission trading system. The author was predicting in his book, in 2001 that the measures adopted by the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol were already proven "to have been an aberration -- the imaginary can opener, not proof that it is feasible to hand out and secure assets worth trillions of dollars under international."

The efforts of the economic world must be accompanied by those of the scientific world in order to come up with plans that are viable both economically and technologically. The researches related to the globalization effects cannot ignore the global warming anymore. Measures destined to the decongest the concentration of agriculture production in certain regions on the planet in order to reduce the risks related to natural disasters that can affect the whole planet are necessary in order to create the conditions of creating diversity and the means to rapidly find replacements for resources that become scarce in one sector with others form another.

Today it has become clear that the earlier the mitigation for global warming process is set into motion the better the results. People have to learn to adapt and cope with the changes brought by the climate changes and their effects on their everyday lives.