Saturday, July 18, 2009

Scientific ways to counteract Global Warming

  1. Mitigation. Mitigation of global warming involves taking actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Mitigation is effective at avoiding warming, but not at rapidly reversing it. Building insulation, fluorescent lighting, and public transportation are some of the most common examples of mitigation. For more about this, visit this Wikipedia site; Mitigation of global warming.
  2. Adaptation. Adaptation to global warming consists of ways to reduce the vulnerability of natural and human systems against actual or expected climate change effects. David King says that "adaptation to global warming is inevitable as it is unlikely that levels of greenhouse gases can be kept low enough to avoid a projected temperature rise of 2 °C". Because of the current and projected climate disruption precipitated by high levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the industrialized nations, adaptation is a necessary strategy at all scales to complement climate change mitigation efforts because we cannot be sure that all climate change can be mitigated. For example, increased use of artificial snow-making in the European Alps, adaptation is also anticipating future climate change, such as the construction of the Confederation Bridge in Canada at a higher elevation to take into account the effect of future sea-level rise on ship clearance under the bridge . For more about this, visit this Wikipedia site; Adaptation to global warming.
  3. Geoengineering. The modern concept of geoengineering is usually taken to mean proposals to deliberately manipulate the Earth's climate to counteract the effects of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions. To date, no large-scale geoengineering projects have been undertaken. The National Academy of Sciences defined geoengineering as "options that would involve large-scale engineering of our environment in order to combat or counteract the effects of changes in atmospheric chemistry". Examples of this include reducing the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, and limiting Arctic sea ice loss. For more about this, visit this Wikipedia site; Geoengineering.

2 comments:

MrWoody said...

IS all this in your own words apart from where you quote directly?
Well done for providing references within the text as hyperlinks. This is good practice and a useful example for others to follow.
:-)
The content is very interesting and quite advanced. If it is in your own words you have done well and are working at a high level. Let's get together to analyse your researching and writing with the curriculum levels handy so we can see where you are at and where to head next.
Keep up the good work.

The Other Boy said...

I can't really remember - it was so long ago, but I think I mostly either wrote it or paraphrased information from a fairly trustworthy source.