CLIMATE CHANGE

Human Activity and Climate Change

Human Activity and Climate Change

Introduction

Fossil fuels are nonrenewable energy resources formed from dead remains of plants and lower animals including phytoplankton and zooplankton that have settled to the sea or lake bottom in large quantities under anoxic conditions. They are nonrenewable resources because they take millions of years to form, and reserves are being depleted much faster than new ones are being formed. They formed from ancient organisms that died and were buried under layers of accumulating sediment. As additional sediment layers built up over these indispensable deposits, the materials subjected to increasing temperatures and pressures, leading to the formation of a waxy material known as kerogen, and subsequently hydrocarbons. The processes involved are diagenesis and cytogenesis.

The increase in world population and the expected economic growth, especially in underdeveloped areas, say the demand for energy and other non-energy commodities continue to rise in coming decades, with the consequent production of waste. All these factors negatively affect the natural environment and make difficult the achievement of the objectives of conventional energy development. In this paper, we analyze the impact of fossil fuels on climate change, encouraging the creation of paradigms that prevent the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels for energy, while invoking the need for the use of advance methods for the essential use of fossil fuels and more specifically the use advanced technology.

Discussion

To this day, the American economy largely depends on fossil fuels—from energy to production and transportation. Power and energy is essentially produced through the combustion of fossil fuels such as oil, gasoline, or coal. Oil consumption alone exceeds 20 million barrels each day in the American economy (Hirsch, Roger and Robert, 2009). This level of consumption, in turn, is creating a variety of ever-more-pressing problems: depletion of resources; dependence on foreign providers; increasing costs; pollution and environmental degradation. Burning of fossil fuels is recognized as the single largest contributor to the release of greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon and methane, leading to potentially catastrophic problems such as global warming and related climate changes ranging from an increase in natural disasters to aridity and rising sea levels (Kunstler, 2005). With fossil-generated power plants leading the way, the U.S. economy emits over 3.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Almost 84 percent of U.S. energy production still comes from nonrenewable, fossil sources (9 percent is nuclear, and only roughly 7 percent is renewable, which includes solar, ...