1 A climate change icon The polar bear has become an international climate change icon. But how much is known about this bear, its habitat and life? This unit will talk about the role of language, but by way of introduction how about the name of this bear? To me it is the polar bear; to a German it is an Eisbär (ice bear) and to a French person it is an ours blanc (white bear). In these three examples the bear is referred to as polar, white, or an ice bear – eminently sensible. The Latin name for th
Learning outcomes By the end of this unit you should be able to: appreciate how chemical processes in the rest of the world affect the Arctic environment and the species inhabiting it; recognise the physical processes that determine atmosphere and oceanic flows in the Arctic; appreciate the scientific research process and the use of scientific evidence; use quantitative scientific evidence to examine the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels a
Introduction The scientific theory of plate tectonics suggests that at least some of these Arctic lands were once tropical. Since then the continents have moved and ice has changed the landscape. This unit will concentrate on evidence from the last 800,000 years using information collected from ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica, and will use this evidence to discuss current and possible future climate. The cores show that there have been nine periods in the recent past when large areas of the Earth
Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. Getty photo disc 2. Enjoyed this? Browse through our host of free module materials on LearningSpace<
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7 Summary This unit has shown you that much of the carbon footprint of an economy is due to the direct and indirect use of energy and consumption of food, goods and services by individuals and households. Hence, what you can do as an individual consumer and/or household member to lighten your carbon footprint can be significant. But communities, business and governments also have a crucial role in tackling greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. After completing this unit you should be able
6.4 The role of governments and business Despite all the possibilities for individual and group action to lighten carbon footprints, there will still be people, groups and organisations who will not be doing much. Many individuals limit themselves to ‘every little bit helps’, with relatively minor effects on their carbon footprint, like reusing plastic bags or recycling paper. This avoids having to consider more significant changes in car and air travel, home energy use, diet or shopping. Others will simply carry on producing an
6.3 The role of active citizens and communities Few people agree that individuals should take the main responsibility for tackling environmental issues. For example, in a 2007 poll of over 2000 UK citizens, 70% agreed that the government should take a lead in combating climate change, even if it means using the law to change people's behaviour. However, over 60% disagreed that there was nothing they could do to avert climate change and over half agreed that they would do more if others did more too, although 40% thought that recycling was
6.2 The role of individuals and households You've been considering how to reduce your own carbon footprint to help tackle the worst effects of climate and other environmental changes. To that extent, ‘I’ as an individual consumer has a role to play. But unless you live alone, you share your household with other people, a group that could be called ‘we’. Everyone in the household may have similar views on living lightly. But, even within a household, there may be different views and priorities about what, if anything, sho
5.3 Moving towards a sustainable carbon footprint So far, you've been considering reductions in average individual or household carbon footprints by 20% to 30% or more. But it is becoming increasingly clear that this will not be enough. As I mentioned in Section 4, developed countries, like Britain, Germany and America, will have to reduce their CO2e emissions by 60% to 80% or more by 2050 to prevent climate change running out of control, while at the same time allowing the growing populations of Africa, India and China to r
4.1 Your carbon footprint Most of this section requires you to continue using the Quick Carbon Calculator (linked in the box below). If you've completed the carbon calculator , you'll have a good idea of your carbon footprint and the relative contribution to the total load made by different components of consumption. You'll also know how your footprint compares to that of an average person in the UK. If you live outside the UK, you may have used a calculator that provides somewhat different information abo
2.8 End of unit question The writer and campaigner George Monbiot wrote the following (in The Guardian Weekly, 10 February 2000): ‘Every time someone in the West switches on a kettle, he or she is helpting to flood Bangladesh’. What is th 2.5.2 Environmental indicators The notion of a link between climatic conditions and the behaviour of plants and animals (e.g. the growth of trees or coral) and the composition of natural communities or ecosystems (the type of vegetation in a given area, say) is fundamental to the use of proxy data to reconstruct past climates. Some examples of biological responses to recent climate change were included in Box 9. Here we should be wary of jumping to conclusions. Such changes involve complex living systems that can respond i 2.2 Records of the Earth's temperature To put the temperature records reported by the IPCC in context, we start with a longer-term geological perspective on the Earth's GMST. 1.7 Summary Figure 12 summarises the ways in which the Earth's surface and atmosphere gain and lose energy. The main points are as follows:  A proportion (the planetary albedo) of the incoming shortwave radiation from the Sun is reflected (or scattered) directly back to space, mainly by clouds and the Earth's surface (especially snow and ice cover), but also by aerosols (e.g. dust, salt particles, etc.). Most of the re 1.1 Introduction At the beginning of the 21st century, terms such as the ‘greenhouse effect’, ‘greenhouse gases’ and ‘greenhouse warming’ are printed or spoken thousands of times a week in the context of climate change caused by human activities. This section is designed to consolidate your understanding of the basic science behind these terms, and then to review what is known about the human impact on the composition of the atmosphere since the dawn of the industrial age, commonly put (in this co Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: The content acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons licence). See Terms and Conditions. Box 1: ‘O sweet spontaneous’. Copyright 1923. Trustees for the E E Cummings Trust. Box 5: Maugh, T H (2008) ‘The MIT Meteorologist’s theory References 2.2 Environmental pragmatism: positioning expert support I believe that the principal task for an environmental pragmatism is not to reengage the … debates in environmental ethics but rather to impress upon environmental philosophers the need to take up the largely empirical question of what morally motivates humans to change their attitudes, behaviours, and policy preferences toward those more supportive of long-term environmental sustainability. (Light, 2002, p. 446) 1.4.3 Framing reality from a critical perspective The question arising from the previous two imperatives of systems thinking – dealing with holism and engaging with multiple perspectives – is how we might develop frameworks that deal responsibly with our inevitable limitations on being holistically comprehensive and epistemologically ‘multiverse’. Ulrich reminds us that a ‘systems approach’ to environmental responsibility is perhaps not quite the panacea that it so often mistakenly promises to be. Take, for example, the ‘ecosys 1.2 A framing paradox: experiencing nature with cognitive tools Whilst language tools are helpful in conveying meaning in conversation amongst humans, establishing what matters in ‘conversation’ between human and non-human nature, or amongst non-human living entities, requires different cognitive tools. Cognition refers to the way in which external information from the environment is processed. As sentient beings, humans and some other animals are able to experience wellbeing and suffering. In the next reading, Ronald Moore examines how we engage with
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