Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Wars as evidence. The increase in world trade as a proportion of world GDP was
proportionately greater between 1870 and 1914 that it has been since 1975. That
expansion was stopped, not just by the First World War, but by the loss of support for
free trade that followed. This led directly to the 1930 depression and indirectly to the
Second World War. All these changes took place when the world population did not
exceed 2 billion. At present time the situation is rapidly changing with the expo-
nential growth of world population exceeding 6.6 billion. Therefore, globalization
process is becoming an inevitable phenomenon of world life. It is for this reason that
the list of the following key questions on globalization must be answered:
Is there any alternative to globalization in the coming decades?
￿
What are the environmental impacts of globalization?
￿
How does globalization affect culture and religion?
￿
What is globalization and when did it start and how does it depend on popu-
lation size?
￿
Who are the players in the interactions between nature and society?
￿
￿
Why is there global inequality, and is it getting worse?
￿
What are the cost and bene
ts of free trade?
￿
What
is
the role of
the internet and communications
technology in
globalization?
Is globalization shifting power from nation states to undemocratic organizations?
￿
Is globalization resulting in industries in developed countries being undermined
by industries in developing countries with inferior labor standards?
￿
What does globalization mean to separate countries like Australia?
￿
Nevertheless, when considering the prospects for life on Earth, it is necessary to
proceed from the human criteria of assessing the level of environmental degrada-
tion, since over time local and regional changes in the environment become global
ones. The amplitude of these changes is determined by mechanisms that manage the
NSS dynamics and structure (Gorshkov et al. 2000, 2004; Ehlers and Kraft 2005;
Guista and Kambhampati 2006). Humankind deviates more and more from this
optimality in the way it interacts with the surrounding inert environment. At the
same time, human society as an element of the NSS tries to understand the character
of large-scale relationships with nature, directing efforts of many sciences to study
cause-and-effect feedbacks from this system. The basic item of a global human
society is the country; that is considered as an NSS component (Kondratyev and
Krapivin 2005a; Olenyev and Fedotov 2003; Wang et al. 2011).
The national safety in present-day conditions is estimated on the basis of many
criteria, mainly military, economic, ecological, and social in character. Develop-
ment of an ef
cient method of objective analysis of the problem of national security
requires the use of the latest methods to collect and process the data on various
aspects of the functioning of the world system. Such methods are provided by
GIMS-technology (Kondratyev et al. 2002; Man et al. 2011a).
This discussion expounds ideas, methods and information technologies that can
help to solve many problems of global ecodynamics . It is clear that formal modeling
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