ECONOMICS OF THE CLIMATE CHANGE

Economics of Climate Change

Economics of Climate Change

Introduction

In the 21st Century, global warming is of crucial importance for countries all over the world. A spot near the equator in Brazil, approximately halfway between the North and South Poles, has been used to illustrate the extent of environmental damage caused by civilization (Williams, 2006). Clouds of smoke hover over the rainforests that are so crucial to the ecological balance of the planet because of the oxygen that they generate. Parts of the rainforests have been burned to make way for factories, fast food restaurants, and other signs of civilization, even though the plants, birds, and animals found in the rainforests can never be replaced. Even the most isolated parts of the world suffer from some of the effects of global warming because of water and air pollution, illegal waste disposal, oil spills, and acid rains that migrate from more civilized areas (Singer, 2007).

Discussion

Scientists announced in September 2003 that a huge ice shelf in the Arctic Ocean, known as the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, was breaking up after three thousand years, giving eerie credence to the threat of global warming (Kok, 2008).

In 1988 in Toronto, Canada, the World Meteorological Association Organization and the United Nations Environment Program established the Panel on Climate Change to examine the affects of global warming on the nations of the world. As a result of the panel's work, 176 countries participated in a worldwide conference on global warming in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan. The Kyoto Conference produced the Kyoto Protocol in which each participating country agreed to set targets for reductions in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants that contribute to the greenhouse effect and established a timeline that individual countries must meet (Fisher, 2006).

Economics of Global Warming

It is crucial to scientifically determine mechanisms responsible for the observed warming of the Earth, and many efforts have been made to prove changes observed during the last 50 years, when human activity has grown fastest and observations of the upper atmosphere have become available. There are measurable signs that warming is underway, because the global atmospheric temperature has increased at least 0.9 degrees F (0.5 degrees C) in the last 100 years (Fisher, 2006). This rise corresponds to the measured increase in atmospheric CO2. Even though short-term temperature trends on the order of 50 or 100 years generally have little meaning with respect to global-scale warming, it is curious to note that studies of global temperature records dating from the late 1800s indicate that the 1980s and 1990s were the warmest two decades on record.

The IPCC has played an important role in providing the attribution of global warming, however, there are still several uncertainties that have to be resolved, including the exact degree of global warming expected in the future, and how changes will vary from region to region around the globe. One reason for scientists' uncertainty about how much global warming will take place is related to the rate of removal of CO2 from ...