Are Humans to Blame for Causing Global Warming?
While there is a lot of evidence to suggest that human activities such as industrial processes and deforestation are changing the global climate, various alternative hypotheses have been proposed to explain the increase in global temperatures:
- The warming is within the range of natural variation. Global temperatures have been going up and down over the past 200,000 years, so the Earth might well be going through a warm period at present.
- Some scientists believe that the global climate, since the end of the 18th century, has been rebounding from the “Little Ice Age”, which lasted from the 1500s to the 1800s.
- The warming is the result of variances in sun spot activity, which occurs in cycles and has a greater affect on Earth’s climate than previously known. Therefore even if dramatic climate change is taking place, we can’t do anything about it because it has an entirely natural cause.
Scientists have studied all these issues with computer models of the climate and suggest that the global warming we have experienced since 1975 is dominated by man-made emissions.
While there is an ongoing discussion as to whether climate models can predict our complex climate system adequately enough (as predicting climate change is open to many variables and you can’t be sure what you’ll get) climate models are considered to be the most suitable tools for providing useful projections of future climates.
Global warming and the worldwide concern about atmospheric pollution have made research and the study of the marine environment a high priority.
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Shipping is for example the least environmentally damaging form of commercial transport as it is a small contributor to the total volume of atmospheric emissions compared to road vehicles and public utilities such as power stations.
The shipping industry is playing its part in reducing these emissions and over the last decade the atmospheric pollution from ships has significantly decreased as a result of extensive improvements to hull design, the use of ships with larger cargo carrying capacities and an increase in fuel efficiency. For example the latest marine engines give a 30% - 40% reduction in discharges of nitrogen oxide, with reductions of 60% likely in the future.
At the moment, most experts agree that global warming is happening, and it’s mostly due to humans. As climate models become more sophisticated and research into global warming becomes more advanced, we might see more evidence to suggest that this isn’t the case.
KEY STAGE 4: GLOBAL WARMING - CLIMATE CHANGE; IMPACTS OF GLOBAL WARMING, POLITICAL RESPONSE TO GLOBAL WARMING.