Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
match their prejudices they make the problem more diffi-
-
cult and more expensive to address.
According to the anthropologists our
first humanoid
ancestor appeared about four million years ago. During
the very long time from then until now the world has
been both hotter and colder; the Arctic oceans have been
ice-free before, and at other times ice has covered large
parts of the world. What makes climate change a major
problem today is the speed of the changes combined with
the fact that there will be about nine billion of us by the
middle of this century and probably
billion by the
end of the century. We were able to adapt to change in
the past as the climate moved back and forth from hot to
cold, but there were tens of thousands of years to each
swing compared with only hundreds of years for the Earth
to heat up this time. The slow pace of change gave the
relatively small population back then time to move, and
that is just what it did during the many temperature
swings of the past, including the ice ages. The population
now is too big to move en masse, so we had better do our
best to limit the damage that we are causing.
Though there is now world agreement that there is a
problem, there is no agreement on how to deal with it or
even on what we should be trying to achieve. The
European Union (EU), a collection of the richer coun-
tries, has a big program aimed at cutting greenhouse gas
emissions. The richest country, the United States, has
only recently acknowledged that human activity is the
main cause of global warming, but has done very little
so far to do anything about it. Russia thinks warming is
good for it and has done nothing. The developing coun-
tries have said it is the rich countries that caused the
.
