Pollution Prevention: Individual Effort

We've all heard about global warming and climate change and the Kyoto Accord, but have you seriously considered how your pollution is affecting the Earth? Over the next week, we will focus on some serious issues and some very simple steps each one of us can take to preserve the planet for our great-grandchildren and beyond.

What is the role of pollution prevention in addressing climate change?

CO2 and water vapor are the largest contributors to the greenhouse effect that regulates the Earth's temperature. The atmospheric blanket around the Earth absorbs the radiant energy released after absorption of the sun's rays. Pollution of the atmosphere directly impacts the temperature control of Earth.

Increased CO2 emissions create an extra layer of blanketing in the atmosphere. This extra warming leads to climate change in the forms of warmer oceans, melting ice caps and glaciers, more pronounced flooding and droughts, agricultural shifts in fertility, human migration and increased global temperature.

Human industrialization over the last 200 years has increased the CO2 in the atmosphere to 30% above the natural level of increase that should have occurred after the last ice age. The planet cannot compensate for this large a fluctuation in its natural chemistry.

The natural evolution of Earth would see increased growth of forests after volcanic activity, sinking and rising of islands and a gradual encroachment of the oceans onto the major land masses over the course of five to ten centuries. With the human acceleration of the warming process, these events are due to occur in a smaller time window.

At current levels of consumption and pollution this window will shrink to less than two hundred years. Pollution prevention is necessary to slow this progression to nominally increased levels rather than the drastically increased current level.

Over 50% of CO2 emissions are resultant from transportation and domestic energy use. Great strides toward industrial reduction of CO2 emissions are laudable, but only a small portion of the effort that needs to be implemented. Individual efforts to conserve energy and reduce transportation dependency are of paramount importance.

In the absence of such pollution reduction, the planetary temperature will continue to rise. As the oceans warm, they will expand further, engulfing low lying, industrializing nations and island communities. The change in the water to land mass ratio will affect the amount of water vapor in the air through accelerated evaporation of the oceans.

Droughts and floods will be more pronounced in areas prone to such weather conditions. This dual effect will compromise the fertility of agricultural land. Further, refugees from such areas will displace land currently regulated to agriculture and reduce current forestation levels for the development of housing.

Finite growth patterns mean that the forests cannot rebuild within the time frame necessary to perform their role in the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere. Alternative solutions, such as the use of recycled steel, for housing construction must be employed to combat the decimation of the forests.

Deforestation will reduce the CO2 removed from the atmosphere. This completed cycle from increasing CO2 to reducing CO2 consumption will change the face of the Earth irrevocably. The hostile environment created will not be conducive to human existence and will hasten the next ice age.

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