European Student Think Tank

As it was emphas­ized in the movie, the earth has a per­fect cycle. This cycle has con­tin­ued through­out the his­tory without inter­rup­tion until the humans star­ted to play a big­ger role. This inter­rup­tion of human­ity star­ted with agri­cul­tural activ­it­ies. By con­sequence, defor­est­a­tion was sped up for the sake of cre­at­ing new agri­cul­tural areas. In the 18^th cen­tury, the Indus­trial Revolu­tion ‘gave’ human­ity new means of pro­duc­tion. Our spe­cies star­ted to use vari­ous energy recourses like fuel oil and coal. What’s more: since then our whole industry and agri­cul­ture since requires oil to func­tion, mak­ing us depend­ent on the ‘black gold’. In a short time, the face of the Earth has dra­mat­ic­ally changed. Big cit­ies have been estab­lished, high tech­no­lo­gical machines were developed which replace man­kind, and even the space flights were started.

The world’s pop­u­la­tion is increasing!

In the movie ‘Home’ it is said that in the last 60 years, the Earth’s pop­u­la­tion has almost tripled, and over 2 bil­lion people have moved to the cit­ies. For example, Shen­zhen, in China, with hun­dreds of sky­scrapers, and mil­lions of inhab­it­ants was just a small fish­ing vil­lage barely 40 years ago. In Shang­hai, 3,000 towers and sky­scrapers have been built in 20 years. These are great examples to show how human­ity has shaped his home.

To feed this rising pop­u­la­tion, a mil­lion tons of fish have been caught by thou­sands of ships without any pre­cau­tion to safe­guard the sus­tain­ab­il­ity of the mar­ine envir­on­ment. In the search for more food, agri­cul­tural land clear­ing ,which is the removal of nat­ive hab­it­ats and veget­a­tion to replace with them agri­cul­ture ,reached new heights. For example, on deforestationintheamazon.wordpress.com, Ryan Wal­ters presents us vari­ous facts on the situ­ation of the Amazon Rain­forests: “Rain­forests once covered 14% of the earth’s land sur­face; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estim­ate that the last remain­ing rain­forests could be con­sumed in less than 40 years”. In addi­tion to defor­est­a­tion, large quant­it­ies of fossil-fuel, fer­til­izers and other vari­ous chem­ic­als have been used to increase agri­cul­tural pro­ductiv­ity for a long time. The above men­tioned  activ­it­ies  led to the emis­sion of a lot of Green­house gasses ,which causes global cli­mate change all over the world.

High Level of Green­house Gases

The green­house gases (car­bon diox­ide, meth­ane, nitrous Oxide, and sulfate) have been mak­ing the world warmer and warmer for dec­ades. Accord­ing to NASA, Janu­ary 2000 to Decem­ber 2009 was the warmest dec­ade on record. NASA also claims that car­bon diox­ide con­cen­tra­tions are at the highest level since  650,000 years. You can see the cur­rent level of car­bon diox­ide on the graph from NASA.

We should not for­get that any indus­trial or agri­cul­tural activ­ity in any place over the world will affect other parts of that same world, because we are liv­ing in the same atmo­sphere.. We can clearly see this in Green­land which is one of the biggest land ices. Although there is not any indus­trial activ­ity in Green­land, ice melt­ing is very clear in the satel­lite images of NASA’s Grav­ity Recov­ery and Cli­mate Exper­i­ment: “In Green­land, the ice (in some places up to 2 km thick) presses down the land, but the last researches show that the ice is melt­ing so fast that the giant island is rising notice­ably as the weight is lif­ted. In some spots, the land is rising 1 inch per year” (Livesci­ence). In addi­tion to the melt­ing of land ice, non-polar gla­ciers have been retreat­ing every­where all over the world espe­cially for the last three dec­ades. Many pho­to­graphs show us how gla­ciers retreated as time went on. For example: “The Pas­terze, Austria’s longest gla­cier, was about 2 kilo­met­ers longer in the 19th cen­tury, but is now com­pletely out of sight from this over­look­ing on the Gross­glock­ner High Road.” (World View of Global Warming)

The retreat of land ice and gla­ciers is a big threat for fresh water. A huge num­ber of people sur­vive with gla­cier fresh water, but if gla­ciers con­tinue to shrink, river sys­tems will be dam­aged and humans will face prob­lems to find drink­ing water.  Fur­ther­more, with­drawal of land ice and gla­ciers will also increase the sea level. If we think about mil­lions of people liv­ing in coastal areas that are less than 5 m above the sea level, human­ity will undoubtedly need to deal with big immig­ra­tion and set­tle­ment prob­lems  in the future. The makers of ‘Home’ ask this ques­tion: “If sea levels con­tinue to rise faster and faster, what will major cit­ies like Tokyo, the world’s most pop­u­lous city, do?”

The Kyoto Protocol

This dra­matic situ­ation of our planet increases the import­ance of the inter­na­tional cooper­at­ive efforts in order to achieve reduc­tions of green­house gas emis­sions. The Kyoto Pro­tocol is the most sub­stan­tial inter­na­tional agree­ment linked to the United Nations Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change (UNFCCC). The major fea­ture of the Kyoto Pro­tocol is that it sets bind­ing tar­gets for  indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries for redu­cing green­house gas emis­sion, for a five-year period (2008-2012).. That means the Kyoto Pro­tocol will end next year. What will be hap­pen then? I think that if we reflect upon the above-mentioned present state of the world, the indus­tri­al­ized coun­tries should take more ser­i­ous and strict steps to greatly reduce green­house gas emissions.

I wish to fin­ish my art­icle with a mean­ing­ful sen­tence from ’Home’: “All liv­ing mat­ter is linked. Water, air, soil, trees. The world’s magic is right in front of our eyes, but we have not under­stood that we are deplet­ing what nature provides”.”

Bib­li­o­graphy:

Cli­mate Data from NASA:  http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/

HOME, A Film by Yann Arthus – Ber­trand: http://www.homethemovie.org/

Livesci­ence: http://www.livescience.com/6462-greenland-rising-rapidly-ice-melts.html

NASA’s Grav­ity Recov­ery and Cli­mate Exper­i­ment : http://www.csr.utexas.edu/grace/

Ryan Wal­ters , Defor­est­a­tion in the Amazon, http://deforestationintheamazon.wordpress.com/facts/

The Kyoto Pro­tocol : http://unfccc.int/kyoto_protocol/items/2830.php

World View of Global Warm­ing, the Pho­to­graphic Doc­u­ment­a­tion of Cli­mate Change, http://www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org/pages/glaciers.html

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