Editorial Note on Global Warming Protection

Brighton Mvumi^*
*Correspondence: Brighton Mvumi, Department of Soil Science and Agricultural Engineering, University of Zimbabwe, Mount Pleasant, Harare, Zimbabwe, Email:

Editorial

Global climate change has been portrayed as an unmitigated disaster for mankind and the environment, but the issue is more nuanced in reality. Although scientists believe that the climate is changing and that human-caused CO2 rises are to blame, there is good news and bad news regarding global warming, as well as some bad news about mitigation efforts. The media and scientific journals give little attention to the potential benefits of a rising climate for some parts of the world; negative news always gets more attention. So, before we evaluate the existing options for mitigating global climate change, let us consider these benefits as well as the costs.

Despite the fact that the terms "global warming" and "climate change" are sometimes used interchangeably, they refer to two distinct processes. Changes in the Earth's temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind, clouds, and precipitation patterns over time are referred to as climate change. Global warming refers to the effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth's average surface temperature and is a contributing element to climate change. Global warming is a term that can be used to describe rising temperatures produced by greenhouse gases. When it comes to other long-term changes in the planet's weather patterns, though, climate change is the more correct word.

"Climatic Change: Are we on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" by geochemist Wallace Broecker featured in the 1975 Science magazine article "Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?" However, scientists began researching the impact of greenhouse gases on the Earth's climate more than a century ago, in 1820. During this time, French scientist Joseph Fourier made the ground-breaking discovery that the Earth's atmosphere serves to retain the sun's heat. Milutin Milankovitch, a Serbian scientist, discovered the long-term climate consequences of natural oscillations in Earth's orbit, as well as the tilt and precession of its axis, in the early 1900s. Since then, scientists and politicians have tried to get a better understanding of how the atmosphere works and how to respond to the difficulties posed by climate change. Certainly, the global climate will warm, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing; we don't always live in the "greatest of all possible climates."

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC; Geneva, Switzerland) bases its projections of how much the climate would change on the idea that economic expansion is fuelled by greater energy use, which increases greenhouse gas output. As a result, expectations of strong global economic development fuelled primarily by fossil fuels drive the models that predict the largest change in climate. However, other IPCC models that use more realistic growth rates project average temperature increases of 2–3 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Almost all models, however, anticipate that the coldest places of the world will continue to get colder.

Rising sea levels may cause major flooding in many coastal places throughout the world. The Pacific Ocean's low-lying islands would soon become uninhabitable. The world's sea level has increased four to eight inches in the last century. Some of these consequences were felt in 2012, when Super storm Sandy slammed the East Coast of the United States and a typhoon in the Philippines killed over 1,000 people. The 2017 hurricane season was the most expensive since 1900, with severe weather and rising sea levels resulting in catastrophic deaths and over $215 billion in property damage in Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico, as well as other states in the United States.

Humanity must release fewer climate-warming greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, while also removing excess carbon from the atmosphere to avoid permanent damage to Earth's life-support systems. This will necessitate a rapid and large-scale shift to clean and renewable energy sources. Even if the world stopped using fossil fuels entirely, we wouldn't be able to avoid a worst-case scenario unless we also reversed the destruction of carbonabsorbing ecosystems like forests. In other words, no matter what, we will fail to prevent catastrophic climate breakdown if we do not conserve and restore nature.

Conservation International's work focuses on natural climate solutions. These are measures that protect, restore, or improve ecosystem usage or management while preserving ecosystems' ability to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere. Nature has the potential to bring us at least 30% of the way to fixing the climate catastrophe while simultaneously delivering a slew of other benefits — such as filtering fresh water and giving clean air — that other climate-change solutions don't [1-5].

References

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