Monday, December 3, 2012

With Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Record High, Worries on How to Slow Warming.


Gillis, Justin, and John Broder. "With Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Record High, Worries on How to Slow Warming." NY Times. N.p., 2 Dec. 2012. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/world/emissions-of-carbon-dioxide-hit-record-in-2011-researchers-say.html?ref=science&_r=0>.
This article, as the title states, talks about how global warming seems to get worse and worse, with worries on how to stop it. Even though global warming is still a debated topic, the earth is getting warmer nonetheless, and countries have signed formal treaty to limit the warming. The main problem though, is that countries around the world, even those who signed the treaty, are not limiting their carbon dioxide emissions. Josep G. Canadell, an Australian scientist, even stated how this issue requires immediate attentions with large and sustained global mitigation effort. New figures show that emissions are falling, but only slowly, in some countries, but this fall is only matched by certain countries, like India and China, who are increasing their emissions. The problem is that there needs to be energy sustainability, rather than running on oil and coal, which cause large emissions of carbon dioxide.
This topic is very important, especially globally, considering it affects not only how people should change their energy usage, but also that it can change whole environments. Countries find the need to cling onto emission-causing energy sources, so as to help their economies, but by doing so, can be greatly hurting the globe in the long run. This is a constant debate of today, for economy versus environment, but global warming is the larges scale debate of this topic.
I did like this article, but there were some parts I thought could have been added into or altered in the piece. It would have been interesting to learn about how the calculations of jumps in percents in temperature globally were calculate, and how they are directly, or indirectly, related to emissions of carbon dioxide. Also, it was a little heavy on the information of the countries and political stand of this topic, rather than the actual science to how much the emissions are a problem, and how to stop them efficiently.

1 comment:

  1. AP Biology Petey DeJoy
    Comment 12/4/12
    I think that Thomas did an excellent job with his article review on "With Carbon Dioxide Emissions at Record High, Worries on How to Slow Warming." In particular, I think that a few aspects of his review were well presented. Primarily, his indication that there is legislation already in some countries to limit carbon emissions was a good way to start the article; it set the stage for the statistics that were brought in following his introduction. The second thing that I thought he did well was to cite India and China as part of the problem. He mentioned that rates of carbon emissions are slowly falling, but are still held back by nations like these two. It was definitely an interesting statistic to include, and I applaud him for that. Finally, his allusion to the debate over economics and the environment provided a very interesting and dynamic piece to the article that pieced it together nicely.
    There are a few different things that Thomas could have done to make his review stronger. Firstly, the wording is a little convoluted. It would be helpful to be a little clearer, as at times it is hard to understand exactly what is being said. Next, I would like to know a little bit more about the debate over the economy and the environment, as it is an interesting topic. For example, instead of just referencing the debate explain the issues at hand a little more.
    I was seriously impressed to learn that many countries that signed the treaty to eliminate emissions are not taking action to do so. This is amoral and could lead to many issues in the future. Regardless, I really enjoyed Thomas’ review.

    ReplyDelete