Climate Change

The terms ‘global warming’, ‘climate change’ and ‘greenhouse gases’ are seen more in International news and headlines these days. This is an issue yet to be understood and accepted by many as a recent global survey by Lee et al. (2015) showed a low percentage of awareness on the subject of climate change in developing nations such as Morocco, Togo, Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia. Climate involves an average assessment of global weather conditions over a longer period of time (up to 30 years) and the observed shift in climate has been towards warmer temperatures; hence the term, global warming.

Global warming has been attributed to the presence of greenhouse gases which were named so due to their ability to imitate greenhouses used to grow plants under controlled conditions. Just as the greenhouse is warmed by allowing the sun’s heat in and preventing it from returning back to the atmosphere, the gases (which include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases) form a ‘blanket’ that traps heat in the atmosphere and in turn increase global temperatures. As tiny grains of sand add up to a desert, so does each one of us contribute a quota to greenhouse gas emissions thereby making the ‘blanket’ thicker and the earth warmer. These gases such as carbon dioxide are released from the fossil fuels we burn for domestic use, the cars we drive everyday and our livestock (yes! animals too!). Because these gases stay long enough in the atmosphere to mix, the amount of emissions is same everywhere irrespective of the source therefore, making it a global problem.

When the overall temperature increases, glaciers and ice caps melt, sea levels rise and who knows? one day we would rise at dawn as we normally do only to find our home surrounded by water. Some other impacts of climate change like severe heat waves and hurricanes could lead to loss of human lives, animals and plants. With the rising need for vehicles to cover longer distances, an effective public transportation system is one of several mitigative approaches to climate change. Imagine a bus with a capacity of 40 passengers versus a personal car that takes 4 passengers at a time. Patronage of the bus service would reduce the number of vehicles on the road by 9. This in turn means less carbon dioxide emissions, more revenue for the government, less traffic on the highways and owners of cars get to save on petrol purchase and car maintenance. In a large city like Istanbul, a subway system is used to carry about 1.5 million passengers a day.

New roads and buildings are constructed everyday at the expense of trees which are needed to maintain carbon dioxide balance. Urbanization may not have a great toll on climate change if buildings are made energy-efficient in terms of utilizing renewable sources of energy and low-energy lamps which would in turn strengthen the national electricity grid. Finally, the three R’s of the environment would be a good guide to climate change mitigation. So let us try to Reduce the amount of waste we generate, Reuse everyday items and Recycle as much as we can.