According to scientists oceans are warming much faster than previously calculate

Question

According to scientists oceans are warming much faster than previously calculated values due to technologies available today such as wireless temperature sensors that can measure ocean temperatures in very deep waters and send the data to computer systems precisely. This may cause frequent hurricanes and storms that may devastate costal areas. Similarly harsh temperature changes in Midwestern states may induce more frequent draught and flood cases as well as tornados and storms than ever before. If global warming and climate change become serious public concerns in Iowa, what might be your response to resolve and help reduce the environmental impacts of it?

What are the challenges? Provide examples and offer methods to resolve the issue(s).

Explanation / Answer

Global warming is already having significant and harmful effects on our communities, our health, and our climate. Sea level rise is accelerating. The number of large wildfires is growing. Dangerous heat waves are becoming more common. Extreme storm events are increasing in many areas. More severe droughts are occurring in others. We must take immediate action to address global warming or these consequences will continue to intensify, grow ever more costly, and increasingly affect the entire planet including you, your community, and your family. By inadvertently increasing the concentration of energy-trapping gases in the lower atmosphere, human actions have begun to amplify Earth’s natural greenhouse effect.

The primary challenge facing the world community is to achieve sufficient reduction in greenhouse gas emissions so as to avoid dangerous interference in the climate system. This volume seeks to describe the context and process of global climate change, its actual or likely impacts on health, and how human societies should respond, via both adaptation strategies to lessen impacts and collective action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As shown later, much of the resultant risk to human populations and the ecosystems upon which they depend comes from the projected extremely rapid rate of change in climatic conditions.

Indeed, the prospect of such change has stimulated a great deal of new scientific research over the past decade, much of which is elucidating the complex ecological disturbances that can impact on human well-being and health. Global climate change is thus a significant addition to the spectrum of environmental health hazards faced by humankind. The global scale makes for unfamiliarity although most of its health impacts comprise increases (or decreases) in familiar effects of climatic variation on human biology and health. Traditional environmental health concerns long have been focused on toxicological or microbiological risks to health from local environmental exposures.

However, in the early years of the twenty-first century, as the burgeoning human impact on the environment continues to alter the planet’s geological, biological and ecological systems, a range of larger-scale environmental hazards to human health has emerged. In addition to global climate change, these include: the health risks posed by stratospheric ozone depletion; loss of biodiversity; stresses on terrestrial and ocean food-producing systems; changes in hydrological systems and the supplies of freshwater; and the global dissemination of persistent organic pollutants. However, even with immediate action, it will still be too late to prevent the extinction of some species, and others will edge closer to extinction as the Earth continues to warm.

Until the greenhouse gases already accumulated in the atmosphere break down and the climate system achieves a new equilibrium, global warming will continue to alter climate patterns around the globe and threaten the natural world for decades, if not centuries. Other changes in the physical world not directly attributed to global warming, but correlated with temperature increases and decreased precipitation, are the increased incidence and intensity of storms and wildfires. Bleaching events have now become an annual occurrence in many parts of the world. The fact that not all change related to global warming will be gradual or linear is especially worrisome. There will be threshold changes and abrupt climate shifts. Such changes have already been recorded in the climate system itself.

One example is the ocean currents of the so-called global conveyor belt, the large-scale movements of ocean water in response to temperature and density. With their ability to capture and transfer heat, the world’s oceans greatly influence our climate today. Deep circulation patterns in the ocean due to variation in water density influence climate because oceans also transport heat. Over geological time, ocean movements have shut down when certain temperature thresholds were reached. Lack of ocean circulation is not only an example of a threshold effect, it is also an illustration of an additional risk of climate change, namely negative feedbacks within the climate system.

Preserving tropical jungles and wetlands, protecting air and water quality, slowing global population growth goals that had all been justified for independent reasons, often by independent organizations could now be linked to a single fact, anthropogenic carbon-dioxide emissions, and advanced along a single political front, the effort to reduce those emissions. Protecting forests, for example, could help fight global warming because forests act as sinks that absorb carbon dioxide. Air pollution could be addressed in part by promoting the same clean-energy sources that would reduce carbon-dioxide emissions.

Population growth needed to be controlled in order to reduce demand for fossil-fuel combustion. The moral problem seemed clear: human beings were causing the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But the moral problem existed only because of a scientific fact a fact that not only provided justification for doing many of the things that environmentalists wanted to do anyway but also dictated the overriding course of action: reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. Thus science was used to rationalize the moral imperative, unify the environmental agenda, and determine the political solution.

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