Essay on The Advancement Of Technology

Free The Advancement Of Technology papers

Ethan Frome
Ethan Frome Ethan Frome, a novel by Edith Wharton, tells the story of a man who no longer loves his wife, and falls in love with her cousin. Ethan Frome married a older woman named Zeena, with whom he has fallen out of love. Mattie Silver, Zeena s cousin, moves in to live with the Frome s and to he

Challenger
Challenger Explosion Many people still remember where they were, what they were doing, and what they felt when they heard about the tragedy of the Challenger. The Challenger disaster served as a violent and shocking reminder that man s quest for the final discovery of our galaxy had never really b

The Advance of Technology and Pollution

Here is a quote that I believe tells the entire story of mankind s existence: "Man's long adventure with knowledge has, to a very marked degree, been a climb up the heat ladder.... Today the flames grow hotter in the furnaces.... The creature that crept furred through the glitter of blue glacial nights lives surrounded by the hiss of steam, the roar of engines, and the bubbling of vats.... And he is himself a flame -- a great, roaring, wasteful furnace devouring irreplaceable substances of the earth." --Loren Eiseley, anthropologist and essayist (1907-1977), Man the Firemaker

As this quote from Loren Eisely suggests the relationship between the advancement of technology and the increase in pollution has gone hand in hand throughout the ages of mankind. Humans are very much responsible for their actions and have and will continue to feel the impact of the carelessness that they have shown toward mother earth.

Studies of temperature records preserved deep in the underground rocks show that the Earth has been gradually warming over at least the last 500 years. These studies, done by scientists in the US and Canada, show that the trend of the increase in climate has increased on an increasing pace during the 20th century, which was the warmest of the past five centuries. Since 1500, the Earth s temperature has increased by about one degree Celsius, with eighty percent of that increase during the last century. In the northern hemisphere, the five-century long change has been 1.1 degrees, with 0.6 occurring since 1900.

There have been numerous extreme changes in the climate throughout the world that have had astonishing effects on the people, wildlife, and environment. Many of these events have led to people having to vastly change their lifestyle or have to move out the area due to the fact that living conditions are unsafe. In the summer of 1998, Dallas, Texas recorded a deadly heat wave. Heat claimed more than 100 lives in the region, as temperatures were over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 straight days. Waimea Bay, Hawaii is has also seen its share of misfortune. Along with costal development, sea levels have risen contributing to considerable beach loss over the past 90 years. In October of 1998, Hurricane Mitch dumped between three and six feet of rain within 48 hours over most of Central America. Mitch killed more than 10,000 people in mudslides and floods, triggered a cholera epidemic, and virtually wiped out the economies of Honduras and Nicaragua.

Several days after the horrendous hurricane in Central America, a large meeting in Buenos Aires met at the fourth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Many at the conference pointed to Hurricane Mitch as an example of the catastrophes that will await our world if we do not act immediately to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other so called greenhouse gasses.

Various experts blame many different sources of technological change and events for this vast change in temperature throughout the world. The fact is, not just one major event or area is the sole cause of this. Fossil fuels, which release carbon dioxide when burned, are used to generate electricity, heat and light homes and workplaces, power factories and run cars. Experts suggest that unless we reduce population growth and use of fossil fuels, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will double by sometime in the middle of the next century.

Starting in the mid-1700s, human activities began to alter the composition of the atmosphere. Vast supplies of charcoal, and later coal and oil, fed the growing fires of the Industrial Revolution. The carbon stored in these fuels was released to the air as carbon dioxide, which is a gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Today, for every one of the more than 5.8 billion people on Earth, nearly six tons of carbon dioxide are spewed into the air annually. As a result of our activities, the atmospheric concentration of this heat-trapping gas has risen by more than 30 percent in the last 250 years. The future of Earth's climate will depend partly on the buildup of heat-trapping gases, primarily carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.

One of the major problems of global warming is that it exists as an environmental issue only because of science. People can t directly sense global warming, the way they can see a clear-cut forest or inhale the urban smog in their lungs. This is an enormous issue to overcome if anything is going to be done. New information is now being presented to the public s eye everyday, giving them new and more accurate facts on such issues. People are starting to become...