Science, Technology and Society

Hand-out title : Climate Change and Energy Crisis

Prepared by: Andronica Jean F. Ambag

Man’s cultural evolution has enabled him to develop agriculture and the
technology which provides him with modern comforts. As a result, he has been able
to escape much of the force of natural selection. He advances by means of invention
and ingenuity rather than by genetic change. His biological evolution lags behind his
cultural evolution. Thus, man is a unique organism.

In spite of his uniqueness, man remains a part of the biopshere, the world of life.
The biosphere is composed of ecosystem. In any ecosystem, there is an interaction of
organisms amd their environment. The environment affects the lives of the organisms,
and the organisms, in turn, affect the total environment.

Man interacts with enviornment in both these ways. He depends upon the
environment, fuel to operate his machines, and other raw materials necessary for
modern-day life. He alters his natural surroundings by clearing land, substituting one
kind of life for another, exterminating pests, disrupting food chains, and pouring
waste materials into air, water and soil. The consequences of man’s effect on nature
are one of the most urgent problems of ecology. The changes which man has been
making in his environment are important not only to plants and animals but to man
himself.

GLOBAL WARMING- is the unusual rapid increase in Earth’s average

surface temperature over the past century.

Life on Earth depends on energy coming from the sun. The light that coming the
sun is known as solar radiation. About half the light reaching Earth’s atmosphere
passes through the air and clouds to the surface, where it is absorbed and then radiated
upward in the form of infrared heat. About 90% of this heat is then absorbed by the
greenhouse gases and radiated back towards the surface. 50% are absorbed by surfece,
which is absorbed by the land, plants, oceans and rivers. Some are reflected back to
space, re-radiated out to space. Some are absorbed by atmosphere and reradiated back
to surface.

GREENHOUSE GASES- are gases in Earth’s atmopshere that trap heat.

They let sunlight pass through the atmosphere, but they prevent the heat that sunlight
brings from leaving the atmopshere.Since theses gases are trapped, it brings back heat
on the Earth’s surface.

DIFFERENT TYPES OF GRENNHOUSE GASES.

1. WATER VAPOR- it is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but importantly, it acts
as a feedback to the climate. Water vapor increases as the Earth’s atmosphere warms,
but so does the possibility of clouds and precipitation, making theses some of the
most important feedback mechanisms to the greenhouse effect. Water vapor is the
water in gas form. Like steam above a boiling pot oe water evaporating off a lake. It
forms clousd and rains back on Earth. This can cause cooling effect.

2. CARBON DIOXIDE- matter for climate change, you cannot see, you cannot
smell it but it is acatually around us. It is the heart of climate crisis. Carbon dioxide is
made of of 1 carbon and 2 oxygen. It occurs naturally in pur atmosphere as a vital part
of life on Earth. Peole and most animals breath in oxygen and breath out carbon
dioxide. Plants need carbon dioxide to help them grow. It helps regulate the
temperature of out planet, carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases. It acts
like the glass in the greenhouse by keeping some of the heat from the sun trapped
inside the Earth’s atmosphere. Without it, the planet would be too cold for us to live
of. HUman activities has increased the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Too much of the sun’s heat is getting trap so that the planet is getting hottere. Carbon
dioxide is from modern-life, factories, cars, appliances etc.

3. METHANE- is a hydrocarbon gas produced both through nature sources and

human activities, including the decomposition of wastes in landfills, agriculture and
especially rice cultivation, as well as ruminant digestion and manure management
associated with dometic livestock. On a molecule to molecule basis, methane is a far
more active greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but also one which is much less
abundant in the atmosphere Naturally occurong methane is found both below the
ground and under the seafloor, and is formed by both geological and biological
process. When methane reaches the atmosphere it is knows and atmospheric methane.
The Earth’s atmospheric methane concentration has increased by about 150% since
1750, and it increased for 20% of the total radiative forcing from all of the long-lived
and globally mixed greenhouse gasses. Methane is non-toxic yet it is extremelt
flammable and may form explosive mictures in with air.

4. NIRTROUS OXIDE- A powerful greenhouse gas produced by soil cultivation

practices, especially by use of commercial and organic fertilizers, fossil fuel
combustion, nitric acid production, and biomass burning. Nitrous oxide is commonly
known as laughing gas. Nitrouos oxide occurs in small amounts in the atmosphere,
but has been found to be a major scaveneger of stratospheric ozone, with an impact
comparable to that of CFCs. It is estimated that 30% of the nitrous oxide in the
atmosphere in the result of human activity, chiefly agriculture and industry. Being the
third most important long-lived greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide substantially contibutes
to global warming.

5. CFC- Synthetic compounds entirely of industrial origin used in a number of

applications, but now largely regulated in production and release to the atmosphere by
international agreement for their ability to contribute to destruction of the ozone layer.
They are not created in nature.Once in the atmosphere CFCs drift slowly upward to
the stratosphere, where they are broken up by ultraviolet radiation releasing chlorine
atoms which are able to destrot ozone molecules. When sunlight returns, the chlorine
begins to destroy the ozone.

GREENHOUSE EFFECT - The greenhouse effect is a process that occurs

when gases in Earth's atmosphere trap the Sun's heat. This process makes Earth
much warmer than it would be without an atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is one
of the things that makes Earth a comfortable place to live.

POLLUTION- Introduction of materials into the environment which decreases the

purity or cleanliness of the environment

Agriculture and technology are the corner-stones of man’s place in biosphere.

They have been responsible for his success and comforts. At the same time, they have
also produced unexpected and undesirable results. In growing crops and
manufacturing goods, man has introduced many industrial materials into the
environment. Many of these materials, industrial products and by-products, decrease
the purity, or cleanliness of the environment. They contribute to pollution of air, water,
and soil.

Harmful materials that was introduced to the environment are called pollutant.
POLLUTANTS can be natural such as volcanic ashes, they can also be created by
human activity such as trash or run-off produced by factories. Nature can handle and
cleanse itself from natural pollutants, what it finds difficult to remedy is the excessive
pollution resulting from man’s activities. Air pollution comes mostly from industries
and motorized vehicles. Water and land pollution are from domestic, agriculture and
industrial wastes.

1. INSECTICIDES
Insects are more numerous than any other type of organism. Some compete with
man for crops and are a general nuisance. In an effort to eliminate many of his insects
“enemies”, man has depended heavily upon chemicals called insecticides.
INSECTIDES are poisons. They interfere with the nervous, respiratory, and metabloic
processes of insects. Thus, they are lethal to many insects.
One of most widely used insecticides in the past was a chemical known as DDT. It
kills insects by paralyzing them.

2. IMPROPER WASTE DISPOSAL AND LITTERING

Nowadays, we are suffering from environmental dilemma. One of the causes of
the environmental problem is the misbehavior of the people towards waste
management. Some people are reckless in throwing their garbage, they do not think
the possible result of their actions in the environment and in our health.
Improper waste disposal is the disposal of waste in a way that has negative
consequences for the environment. Examples include littering,hazardous waste that is
dumped into the ground,and not recycling items that should be recycled.

3. Emissions of many air pollutants have been shown to have variety of effects on
our health and our environment. Automobiles emit many chemicals into the
atmosphere. Some of these chemicals cause irritation to the eyes and respiratory tract.
Other may cause cancer or acts a poisons. Plants are also affected by some of these
pollutants.
OVERPOPULATION
According to Paul R. Ehrlich, millions of people are going to starve to death, and
soon. There is nothing that can be done to prevent it. They will die because of
shortsighted governmental attitudes. They will die because some religious
organizations have blocked attempts over the years to get governmental actions to
control human birthrate. They will die because many people, who recognized the
essential role of over population in the increasing woes of Homo sapiens, could not
bring themselves to leave the comforts of their daily routine to do something about it.
Their blood will be distributed over many lands.

Overpopulation occurs when a species population exceeds the carrying capacity

or its ecological niche. Overpopulation can further be viewed, in a long term
perspective, as existing when a population cannot be maintained given the rapid
depletion of non-renewable resources or given the degradation of the capacity of the
environment to give support to the population.Factors such as intraspecific
competition, war, famine, and disease may act as natural checks on the human
population.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change describes a change in the average conditions- such as temperature

and rainfall- in a region over a long period of time.

EVIDENCES FOR RAPID CLIMATE CHANGE

1. GLOBAL TEMPERATURE RISE

The planet's average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit
since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and
other human-made emissions into the atmosphere. Most of the warming occured in
the past 35 years, with the six warmest years on record taking place since 2014. Not
only was 2016 the warmest uear on record, but 8 of the 12 months that make up the
year-from January through September, with the execption of June- were the warmest
on record for those respective months.

2. WARMING OCEANS
The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about
2300 feet) of ocean showing warming of more than 0.4 degrees fahrenheir since 1969.

3. SHRINKING ICE SHEETS

The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have decreased in mass. Data from NASA's
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost and average of 286
billion tons of ice.

4. DECREASE SNOW COVER

Sattelite observation reveal that the amount of spring snow cover in the Northern
Hemisphere has decrease over the past five decades and that the snow is melting
earlier.
5. SEA LEVEL RISE
Global sea level rose about 8 inches in the last century. The rate in the last two
decades, however, is nearly double that of the last century and is accelerating slightly
every year.

6. OCEAN ACIDIFICATION
Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the acidity of surface ocean waters
has increased by 30 percent. This increase is the result of humans emitting more
carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and hence more being absorbed into the oceans.

CLIMATE CHANGE CONSEQUENCE

1. EXTINCTION

Extinction, in biology, the dying out or extermination of a species. Extinction

occurs when species are diminished because of environmental forces (habitat
fragmentation, global change, natural disaster, overexploitation of species for human
use) or because of evolutionary changes in their members (genetic inbreeding,
poor reproduction, decline in population numbers).
Rates of extinction vary widely. For example, during the last 100,000 years of
the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago), some 40 percent of the
existing genera of large mammals in Africa and more than 70 percent in North
America, South America, and Australia went extinct. Ecologists estimate that the
present-day extinction rate is 1,000 to 10,000 times the background extinction rate
(between one and five species per year) because of deforestation, habitat loss,
overhunting, pollution, climate change, and other human activities—the sum total of
which will likely result in the loss of between 30 and 50 percent of extant species by
the middle of the 21st century.
Many species have become extinct because of hunting and overharvesting, the
conversion of wetlands and forests to croplands and urban areas, pollution, the
introduction of invasive species, and other forms of human-caused destruction of their
natural environments. Indeed, current rates of human-induced extinctions are
estimated to be about 1,000 times greater than past natural (background) rates of
extinction, leading some scientists to call modern times the sixth mass extinction. This
high extinction rate is largely due to the exponential growth in human numbers:
growing from about 1 billion in 1850, the world’s population reached 2 billion in
1930 and more than 7.8 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach about 10 billion by
2050. As a result of increasing human populations, habitat loss is the greatest factor in
current levels of extinction. For example, less than one-sixth of the land area of
Europe has remained unmodified by human activity, and more than half of all wildlife
habitat has been eliminated in more than four-fifths of countries in the paleotropics
(the Old World tropics that span Africa, Asia, and Indonesia).

2. THREAT TO AGRICULTURE PRODUCTIVITY AND FOOD SECURITY

Food is an important resource. As the human population size increases, the food
supply cannot be renewed quickly enough. Thus, food becomes a nonrenewable
resource.
3. HEATWAVE

A heat wave, or heatwave,is a period of excessively hot weather, which may be

accompanied by high humidity, especially in oceanic climate countries. While
definitions vary, a heat wave is usually measured relative to the usual weather in the
area and relative to normal temperatures for the season. Temperatures that people
from a hotter climate consider normal can be called a heat wave in a cooler area if
they are outside the normal climate pattern for that area.

Hyperthermia, also known as heat stroke, becomes commonplace during periods

of sustained high temperature and humidity. Older adults, very young children, and
those who are sick or overweight are at a higher risk for heat-related illness. The
chronically ill and elderly are often taking prescription medications
(e.g., diuretics, anticholinergics, antipsychotics, and antihypertensives) that interfere
with the body's ability to dissipate heat.

4. DISASTERS

The Philippines has suffered from an inexhaustible number of deadly typhoons,

earthquakes, volcano eruptions and other natural disasters. Annually, approximately
80 typhoons develop above tropical waters, of which 19 enter the Philippine region
and six to nine make landfall, according to the Joint Typhoon Warning
Center (JTWC).

The Philippines is in fact the country most exposed to tropical storms in the world.
Violent tropical storms, such as the latest Haiyan typhoon, can generate 10 times as
much energy as the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS

The energy crisis is the concern that the world’s demands on the limited natural
resources that are used to power industrial society are diminishing as the demand rises.
These natural resources are in limited supply. While they do occur naturally, it can
take hundreds of thousands of years to replenish the stores.

VARIOUS CAUSES OF ENERGY CRISIS

1. OVERCONSUMPTION
Overconsumption is a situation where resource use has outpaced
the sustainable capacity of the ecosystem. A prolonged pattern of overconsumption
leads to environmental degradation and the eventual loss of resource bases.
Generally, the discussion of overconsumption parallels that of human
overpopulation; that is the more people, the more consumption of raw materials takes
place to sustain their lives. However, humanity's overall impact on the planet is
affected by many factors besides the raw number of people. Their lifestyle (including
overall affluence and resource utilization) and the pollution they generate
(including carbon footprint) are equally important. Currently, the inhabitants of
the developed nations of the world consume resources at a rate almost 32 times
greater than those of the developing world, who make up the majority of the human
population (7.4 billion people). As the population increases, energy consumption also
increases.

2. OVERPOPULATION

Another cause of the crisis has been a steady increase in the world’s
population and its demands for fuel and products. No matter what type of food or
products you choose to use – from fair trade and organic to those made from
petroleum products in a sweatshop – not one of them is made or transported without a
significant drain on our energy resources.

3. POOR INFRASTRUCTURE

Aging infrastructure of power generating equipment is yet another reason for

energy shortage. Most of the energy-producing firms keep on using outdated
equipment that restricts the production of energy. It is the responsibility of utilities to
keep on upgrading the infrastructure and set a high standard of performance.

4. UNEXPLORED RENEWABLE ENERGY OPTIONS

Renewable energy still remains unused in most of the countries. Most of

the energy comes from non-renewable sources like coal. It, therefore, remains the top
choice to produce energy.

Unless we give renewable energy a serious thought, the problem of energy crisis
cannot be solved. Renewable energy sources can reduce our dependence on fossil
fuels and also helps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

5. WASTAGE OF ENERGY

In most parts of the world, people do not realize the importance of conserving
energy. It is only limited to books, the internet, newspaper ads, lip service, and
seminars. Unless we give it a serious thought, things are not going to change anytime
sooner.

6. MAJOR ACCIDENTS AND NATURAL CALAMITIES

Major accidents like pipeline burst and natural calamities like the eruption of
volcanoes, floods, earthquakes can also cause interruptions to energy supplies. The
huge gap between supply and demand for energy can raise the price of essential items,
which can give rise to inflation.

7. WARS AND ATTACKS

Wars between countries can also hamper the supply of energy, especially if it
happens in Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, UAE, or Qatar.
That’s what happened during the 1990 Gulf war when the price of oil reached its peak
causing global shortages and created major problems for energy consumers.

EFFECT OF GLOBAL ENERGY CRISIS

1. ENVIRONMENTAL EFFECT

Energy is produced by the burning of non-renewable fossil fuels. This does not
only affect the global resources of fossil fuels, but it also affects the environment. The
burning of fossil fuels releases greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and others.

These gases create a blanket on the earth’s surface, which prevents the release of
the short rays of the sun by night. Thus, the energy crisis facilitates making the earth a
warmer place by promoting global warming.

2. INCREASING PRICES OF THE FUEL RESOURCES

As the use of fossil fuels increases, the cost of these resources increases too. We
must remember that the quantity in which these fossil fuels are available is limited. As
we keep on using these resources, the amount of these fossil fuels further decreases.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM OF GLOBAL ENERGY

CRISIS

1. Move Towards Renewable Resources

The best possible solution is to reduce the world’s dependence on non-renewable
resources and to improve overall conservation efforts. Much of the industrial age was
created using fossil fuels, but there is also known technology that uses other types of
renewable energies – such as steam, solar, and wind.

2. Buy Energy-Efficient Products

Replace traditional bulbs with CFLs and LEDs. They use fewer watts of
electricity and last longer. If millions of people across the globe use LEDs and CFLs
for residential and commercial purposes, the demand for energy can go down, and an
energy crisis can be averted.

3. Lighting Controls
Preset lighting controls, slide lighting, touch dimmers, integrated lighting
controls are few of the lighting controls that can help to conserve energy and
reduce overall lighting costs.