Outline:
- Global warming is man-made changes leading to a rise in the general temperature levels of the Earth
- It is leading to a more heated world when an increase of the greenhouse gases occurs. This is because the thickness of the ozone layer decreases, and hence the Earth is not as protected to the sun as it was before the increasing greenhouse gases
Christoffer Betting's List: English Research; nature & society
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Topic sentence
Nature and society are in conflict with each other and humans must choose between the two
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Thesis statement
Opposing common beliefs that the contemporary society does not affect the environment, the modern society is, in fact, in clear conflict with nature and humans have to change the society's capitalist mindset, before it proves to become fatal for both humans and the nature.
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Book Source
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Feb 19, 12
"The sun's energy enters the atmosphere. Some of that energy warms up the earth and its atmosphere and then is re-radiated back into space in the form of infrared radiation. But greenhouse gases soak up some of the infrared, preventing it from escaping into space...As a result, the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere and oceans is getting dangerously warmer. This is what the climate crisis is all about" (25).
Note: This is why global warming potentially will be able to melt the North- and South pole, eventually flooding many locations on Earth and forcing people to live in the heights.
Source citation:
Gore, Albert. An inconvenient truth, the crisis of global warming. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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Feb 19, 12
"Higher temperatures dry out soil, which needs to hold in moisture in order for healthy crops to grow. If, here in the United States, we continue to add CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate we have been, in less than fifty years, vast areas of our farmland will dry out" (54).
Note: The increasing CO2 pollution is evidently leading to more extreme weather conditions, affecting humans, animals and the nature.
Source citation:
Gore, Albert. An inconvenient truth, the crisis of global warming. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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Feb 19, 12
"They maintain an average temperature on Earth of 59 degrees F...trouble has arisen because industry, technology, and our modern lifestyle release too much of these greenhouse gases"(22).
Note: Even though we, and Earth, are dependent on the greenhouse gases, they can also damage the nature.
Source citation:
Gore, Albert. An inconvenient truth, the crisis of global warming. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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Feb 19, 12
"The Earth's atmosphere is so thin that we are capable of dramatically changing its composition. Indeed, we have already dangerously increased the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere" (21).
Note: We should, being a huge factor on deciding the atmosphere's condition, take our responsibility more seriously. This can only be done by changing the overall attitude humans posses toward the nature.
Source citation:
Gore, Albert. An inconvenient truth, the crisis of global warming. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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Feb 16, 12
"When the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun during the spring and summer, the leaves come out. They breathe in CO2, thus decreasing the amount of it worldwide. However, when the Northern Hemisphere is tilted away from the sun in autmn and winter, the leaves fall and release CO2. The amount of this gas in the atmosphere goes back up again. It's as if the entire Earth takes a big breath in and out once each year. The "inhale" accounts for the yearly dip in CO2" (30).
Note: the direct affect that the Northern Hemisphere has on the atmosphere is decribed in the passage, explaining why, in the winter and autumn, there is more CO2 relased than in the summer. According to the source, the decrease of the yearly dip in CO2 emissions is because of the leaves comming out in the summer and spring.
Source citation:
Gore, Albert. An inconvenient truth, the crisis of global warming. New York: Viking, 2007. Print.
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Society's and nature's affect on each other
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Climate change refers to man-made changes in our climate. It is often also called ‘global warming’, as one of the most well-known effects of climate change is a steady rise in the Earth’s temperature (1).
Other effects include sea levels getting higher, ice melting at the poles, and extreme weather events like hurricanes and droughts becoming more common (2). Many animals are also struggling to survive as their habitats change (3).
Climate change is caused by an increase in the amount of gases in our atmosphere that trap heat. These gases occur naturally and ensure the Earth is maintained at a life-supporting temperature, in a process called ‘the greenhouse effect’. However, human activities that burn fossil fuels like coal and oil are increasing the amount of these gases in our atmosphere, causing the Earth to warm to abnormal levels (2) (4).
Scientists are predicting that climate change will cause a mass extinction of many species of plants and animals. As ice melts in the Polar Regions, polar bears and emperor penguins are losing vital habitats, the ocean is also becoming more acidic which is killing many corals. Species that live or breed on low-lying remote islands, like marine turtles, are threatened by rising sea levels and extreme weather, and many plants, which cannot move to find new habitats, are disappearing from parts of their range, due to drought and higher temperatures (3).
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The passage is explaining how global warming is affecting the Earth, and the nature within it.
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The oceans have absorbed up to half of this excess CO2, which has resulted in changes in the chemistry of surface seawater.
The CO2 in the water, which leads to the formation of carbonic acid, has caused the pH of surface oceans to fall by 0.1 units, and it is projected to fall a further 0.3-0.4 pH units by the end of the century.
The shift in the waters' chemical make-up not only increases its acidity, but reduces the availability of carbonate ions, which many creatures use to build shells and skeletons out of calcium carbonate.
The decrease in available carbonate ions means that organisms, such as plankton, coral and molluscs, struggle to build or maintain their protective or supportive structures.
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Outline:
- In the future, if society does not decrease the amount of pollution, many species will cease to exist
- The decrease of species available will also affect society, as several humans rely on selling the involved species that no longer will be available in the future -
This passage describes how the society is affecting the nature, with the scientific aspect also taken into account.
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Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a sharp increase in atmospheric CO2 as a result of human activity, primarily from burning fossil fuels.
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Outline:
- The Industrial Revolution, which marked the start of the increasing atmospheric CO2, symbols the change of society's mindset. Since the Industrial Revolution, society, and humans in general, have been very focused on earning money and not preserving the nature -
Because of the actions of society, and the general mindset of everyone, we are polluting the nature on a daily basis
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Man is constantly aware of the influence of nature in the form of the air he breathes, the water he drinks, the food he eats, and the flow of energy and information. And many of his troubles are a response to the natural processes and changes in the weather, intensified irradiation of cosmic energy, and the magnetic storms that rage around the earth. In short, we are connected with nature by "blood" ties and we cannot live outside nature. During their temporary departures from Earth spacemen take with them a bit of the biosphere. Nowhere does nature affect humanity in exactly the same way. Its influence varies. Depending on where human beings happen to be on the earth's surface, it assigns them varying quantities of light, warmth, water, precipitation, flora and fauna. Human history offers any number of examples of how environmental conditions and the relief of our planet have promoted or retarded human development.
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Outline:
- Nature is everything we live in and depend on, as we are "connected with nature by "blood" ties and we cannot live outside nature"
- Nature's influence on human development can be compared to society's affect on the environment, in that "its influence varies" -
Source Citation:
Spirkin, A. "Man in the Realm of Nature." Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.
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Man's influence on nature. Man is not only a dweller in nature, he also transforms it. From the very beginning of his existence, and with increasing intensity human society has adapted environing nature and made all kinds of incursions into it. An enormous amount of human labour has been spent on transforming nature. Humanity converts nature's wealth into the means of the cultural, historical life of society. Man has subdued and disciplined electricity and compelled it to serve the interests of society. Not only has man transferred various species of plants and animals to different climatic conditions; he has also changed the shape and climate of his habitation and transformed plants and animals. If we were to strip the geographical environment of the properties created by the labour of many generations, contemporary society would be unable to exist in such primeval conditions.
Man and nature interact dialectically in such a way that, as society develops, man tends to become less dependent on nature directly, while indirectly his dependence grows. This is understandable. While he is getting to know more and more about nature, and on this basis transforming it, man's power over nature progressively increases, but in the same process, man comes into more and more extensive and profound contact with nature, bringing into the sphere of his activity growing quantities of matter, energy and information.
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Outline:
- Man transforms the nature towards the interests of society
- In the course of society's development, humans become more independent and hence less dependent on nature
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Source Citation:
Spirkin, A. "Man in the Realm of Nature." Marxists Internet Archive. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.
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today’s environmental problems can be found in the early modern period, an era in which, Merchant says, nature was robbed by science of its right to life and spirit and became, effectively, a machine. According to Merchant, in the early 16th century with the rise of modern science and technology, mankind’s view of nature as a living being changed and nature became a machine to be dominated, dismantled and its secrets discovered, no matter what the cost.
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Outline:
- The society has resulted in negative outcomes for the nature, as the nature "became a machine to be dominated, dismantled"
- The technological advance, by human society, has proven to be a great threat to nature -
Source Citation:
Jackson, Sarah. "The Death (and Rebirth) of Nature." Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Professor Schwartz, 1999. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.
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"advocated power over nature through manual manipulation, technology, and experiment" (216). She stresses time and again the brutality of Bacon’s attitude toward nature as a mere object. She assimilates Bacon’s ideas about science and nature into her argument saying, "The new man of science must not think that the ‘inquisition of nature is in any part interdicted or forbidden.’ Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made a ‘slave,’ put ‘in constraint’ and ‘molded’ by the mechanical arts" (169).
This doctrine of nature as an inert, unfeeling machine that Bacon and his contemporaries advocate so adamantly seems to have changed forever the belief in organicism, or, that all living beings are an equal part of nature.
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Outline:
- The recent technological advance has lead humans to utilize the nature in a way, which ultimately can destroy it
- It is primarily because of the desire to earn money, that humans' have acquired an attitude toward "nature as an inert, unfeeling machine" -
Source Citation:
Jackson, Sarah. "The Death (and Rebirth) of Nature." Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Professor Schwartz, 1999. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.
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Opposing viewpoints
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In short, Easterbrook's predictions are based on assuming that correlation equals causation, and a few of the myths in our database including the top 2 most used "skeptic" arguments - "Climate's changed before", "It's the sun", and "It's Pacific Decadal Oscillation". Easterbrook assumes that the cooling periods in the past might be repeated again in the future, presuming they were mainly caused by solar activity and PDO.
Easterbrook also apparently does not believe that human greenhouse gas emissions will have any significant effect on global temperatures; therefore, this is not a physics-based prediction. Even the most ardent climate scientist "skeptics" like John Christy and Richard Lindzen admit that human CO2 emissions will cause some amount of warming, based on fundamental atmospheric physics.
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Outline:
- Don Easterbrook believes that "cooling periods in the past might be repeated again"
- He does not think it is because of society, meaning the human greenhouse gas emissions, that the global temperatures are changing -
Source citation:
"Lessons from Past Climate Predictions: Don Easterbrook." Skeptical Science. Web. 13 Feb. 2012.
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In short, over the first decade of his global cooling projections, Easterbrook has already been wrong by between 0.3 and 0.5°C. This awe-uninspiring result is due to the fact that Easterbrook's is not a physics-based model. He simply assumes that correlation equals causation and future climate change will be similar to past patterns. However, given that human greenhouse gas emissions are dominating current and future climate changes, ignoring this elephant in the room is the primary cause for Easterbrook's projection inaccuracy.
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Easterbrook chooses to ignore the greenhouse gas emissions in his projection. This is why his assumption is not to be considered correct.
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Outline:
- It can be proven that Easterbrook's assumptions, regarding a global cooling, are not exact. Hence, the opposing view of Easterbrook is invalid - 1 more sticky notes...
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