Impact of Climate Change on the World

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.