Exterpation On Earth And Humanity Term paper
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Ryan VincelMr. BeckEng.101 Sec 56 October, 1998The Extirpation of Earth & Humanity Last summer my Dad, my aunts boyfriend and I took the day and drove up to Lake Stockton to check on my dads boat. My dad kept his boat on a lift in a slip that he rented, so that he wouldn t have to tow it every time he wanted to go fishing. I guess he felt it was worth the expense than to fuss with towing it every time. Once we arrived, dad looked over the boat and felt it looked fine and that it didn t need much maintenance. We had planed to spend the day getting the boat ready for the summer fishing. We quickly got the boat in shape and decided to spend the rest of the day on the lake fishing.We first set out towards Master s Island. I had noticed that the water was blue with a tinge of grayish-green. The sky was also blue and clear and the trees had reached their full height of dark green. It was windy and the limbs blew back and forth on the trees that lined the lake. I had also noticed that the lake was down quite a bit than normal, and there were a lot of boaters; some fishing and some there to enjoy the lake. Because the lake was so crowded fishing wasn t very good. We tried to troll for bass but found that it was futile. We mainly spent the day catching small walleye and even smaller perch. Nothing we caught that day was very big. It actually was the worst day of fishing that summer because we spent a lot of time being hung up and loosing a bunch of lures on shrubs that we couldn t see. Generally when the lake is higher we wouldn t have to deal with the trees and shrubs that lay hidden beneath the water.However, what disturbed me the most was that, because the lake was so low, we also pulled up lots up garbage. Things like discarded shoes, cans and old shirts. Kevin, my aunt s boyfriend, got caught on an old tire once. He was extremely angry because he lost an expensive lure. My dad, at one point, caught a two-pound old diaper. Kevin was upset about loosing his lure, but we all were upset by the condition of the lake. Kevin made the statement, It takes Mother Nature hundreds of years to build a lake complete with its citizenry of plants and animals, but it only takes humanity less than a century to destroy it, this got me to thinking about my extra credit paper coming due in earth science that I was wrestling with, mainly a topic, and this seemed to spark my attention. At the time I didn t realize what I was getting into. However, with my research I discovered how fast mankind could pave over a prairie or erect a city as vast as the forest that once stood in its place. In the last one hundred years man has paved over thousands of acres of forest, mined millions of tons of coal and has extracted trillions of gallons of oil out to the earth. Man has burned almost as much forest as he has cut down trying to clear land for cattle and agriculture. With all this digging, burning, pumping, and paving man has brought Mother Nature to her knees. She no longer can walk freely at her own will. She no longer controls the winds that bring rain, snow or the cool breezes of early summer that blow across Lake Stockton. Man has taken her rights to the world away from her. Humanity has literally created a different atmosphere around the earth by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and methane gas in the earth s skies. Humanity has released so much carbon dioxide in the stratosphere that he has altered literally changed the Earth s atmosphere. The Scripps Institution hired Charles Keeling to in 1958 to test the Earth s atmosphere for carbon dioxide. His findings revealed that the atmosphere was indeed filling up with carbon dioxide. Keeling s readings contained about 315 parts per million of carbon dioxide. Later readings showed that each year the figure increased at a growing rate of about .7 parts per million. Roughly, today it at 1.5 parts per million. (MCKIBBEN 12) The difference does not seem that drastic, yet when scientists drilled holes in the frozen glaciers; and tested the trapped ancient air millions of years old; and also by testing air trapped in old telescopes; they calculate that the atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution contained approximately only 280 parts per million carbon dioxide. 280 parts per million is the highest the atmosphere has been in the last 160,000 years. Today it is at 360 parts per million. These findings show a rate of 1.5 parts per million per year; In short the Pre-Industrial Revolution concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be doubled in the next 140 years. (MCKIBBEN 12) What Keeling has discovered, as we have seen, carbon dioxide at very low levels helps determine the climate. If these low levels are even doubled it would have devastating effects on the earth s weather. In other words, its like adding to much salt to cake batter, or cooking it a couple of degrees hotter then one should at the same amount of time. 1.5 parts per million per year does matter. The 1.5 parts per million per year will not stay. It is inevitable that it will increase. The world s population is increasing. According to UN statistics released in May of 1989 it is expected to double and perhaps nearly triple again before reaching a plateau within the next century. This means that energy consumption will increase too. The population of the world in this century has more than tripled. In the last century industrial production has grown fifty-fold and as much as four-fifths of that growth as been since 1950. Almost all of it has been fueled by fossil fuels. What is very alarming about this is that China s population has increased from 2.1 to 2.4 children per women in 1986 and has remained there since. China who has just surpassed Russia in coal consumption, and has the largest reserves, has released plans that she will double her coal consumption by the year 2000. This means in short that the world will use two and three percent more each year. What makes this shocking is that it s going to be in coal, which is the leader in emitting carbon dioxide; for instance coal emits twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas. (MCKIBBEN 13) Using up Mother Natures Fossil fuels is not the only way mankind has brought her to her knees. As I wrote before, mankind has cut down and burned a lot of trees. The deforestation that goes on today adds between about one billion and two point five billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere yearly. This is twenty percent more than the amount emitted by fossil fuels. Trees and shrubby forests only cover forty percent of the land on the globe and has shrunk by about a third since earlier agricultural times; which started to grow around the thirteen hundreds and exploded around the fifteen hundred with the improvement of...
Mckibben, Bill, The End of Nature. NewYork: Random House, 1989Schneider, Stephen Henry, Global Warming: Sierra Club Books, 1991Oppenheimer, Michael, Dead Heat: The Race against the Greenhouse Effect. New York: Basic Books, 1990MLA Style
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