Enwere Dike

Global Warming and Climate Change Enwere Dike

Global warming and climate change constitute the dominant environmental degradation threat currently confronting human society. Academic writings in the scientific literature, policy speeches at national and international forums, media publicity, etc.all stress this fact: Global warming and climate change are no longer just a hypothesis, but an established fact whose symptoms are clearly visible in every continent and in all spheres of planet Earths environment. The major cause of global warming and climate change is human-induced GHG emissions into Earths atmosphere. Huge atmospheric concentrations of GHGs beyond the assimilation capacity of Earths atmosphere as a waste sink have transformed the chemical composition of the atmosphere, leading to global warming and climate change. The process of enhanced atmospheric GHG emissions began, in concrete terms, with the European Industrial Revolution starting in the mid-1700s and 1800s, which inaugurated so-called modern economic growth (Kuznets 1966), whose lifeblood, as it were, is fossil-fuel energy (coal, petroleum, natural gas). Combustion of fossil fuels to drive industrial growth, transportation and myriad domestic activities, agricultural modernization linked to heavy use of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers, land-use change (specifically, deforestation, livestock production, forest fires, etc.)all these have constituted the key sources of Earth-heating GHGs. This study seeks to pursue four broad objectives. The first is to explain how global warming and climate change constitutes a global environmental problemthat is, why and how the costs/damages arising from global warming and climate change are shared by the entire world community. The second is to identify, in concrete terms, and explain the specific human (anthropogenic) activities that emit the GHGs known to cause global warming and climate change. The third is to highlight the specific symptoms of global warming and climate change in.