Impact of Climate Change on the World
Male: During the 1980’s, a scientific evidence on the run of the hottest
years on record confirmed global warming. Governments began to
take the issue more seriously. There was also greater evidence of
the destruction of the ozone layer by manmade chemicals. An
agreement in 1987 at Montreal to protect the ozone layer marked
the turning point.
Bob Watson: Once we demonstrated that human activities were responsible for
ozone depletion, the governments of the world and the industries
of the world took it very, very seriously. So I believe that we
established a cause and effect between human activities and
climate change, governments take it even more seriously than they
did before.
John Gummer: Climate change is the first area but there are others, probably
ozone as well which shows that the old view, that model issues
had, that we all live in one world, that we were brothers one way or
another and so the really just view is now not just a model view but
is a practical view that we all put into the atmosphere things that
destroy each others climate.
Male: The people who live in months some of the tallest mountains in the
world are now facing up to the reality of global warming and the
threat it brings. Here in the Himalayas, glaciers are retreating some
by as much as 100 meters in the past 15 years. As the ice melt,
lakes form behind the debris left by the glaciers but the water has
nowhere to go and like a tap left on in the bathtub it’s only a matter
of time before it overflows into the valley below.
Dr. J. Reynolds: What we now have to do is to go up above the cliff and find out
other crevasses and see if this pose is going to continue and how
much further because now we have a clear indication as to how
fast this is moving. The rate at which this is melting back is
actually faster than I anticipated in May.
Male: The world’s retreating glaciers from the Alps to Antarctica are
only one example of the effects of global warming. Drought, forest
fires, wild fluctuations in ocean currents and early springs are
linked in the public mind to a change in climate. Those concerns
find a resonance among our more cautious scientific community.
Claude Martin: I see the scientists stoned out the fact that climate changes allude.
Climate change is happening and interestingly in the past year even
governments such as US government they don’t contest the fact
that climate change is happening, even those lobbyists who have
been lobbying against climate change, they have changed their
tactics and say, “Well, measures against climate change are too
expensive”. But they don’t really question that climate change is
really happening.
Male: More than a thousand of the world’s scientists say that average
global temperatures will increase between one and 3.5 degrees
Celsius over the next hundred years if nothing is done about global
warming. Even a one-degree rise would be larger than anything
experienced on earth in the last ten thousand years.
Bob Watson: What I think will happen if the science progresses will be even
more subtlety about the relationship between human activities and
climate change and a better understanding of how climate change
make at the regional level and therefore, we could be more specific
of the adverse consequences in different areas of the world.
Male: When ratified, the Kyoto protocol commits industry on this
country to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases into the
atmosphere to an average of 5% below the levels they were in
1990. This has to be done by 2012. But representatives of some of
America’s largest industries are angry that they are being asked to
make too many concessions to the Europeans.
William O’Keefe: Europe is the beneficiary of shutting down East Germany because
those emissions were in the 1990 based in the UK it is the
deregulation utility industry and the shift from natural gas so
accidents that had nothing to do with climate change have given
Europe a benefit.
Male: Others take the view that the agreement that came out of Kyoto is
full of loopholes, too many to make the changes in the cause of
economic development that scientists say must take place if the
world is to head of a global catastrophe.
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