This is so because study of the driving forces is supported by organized subdisciplines or interdisciplinary fields in social science, such as population studies, development studies, and policy analysis, whereas an interdisciplinary environmental social science—a field that examines the environmental effects of the driving forces—is not yet organized. 4. Then, in the 1870s, meatpackers began experimenting with ice-refrigerated railroad cars that could deliver dressed beef, slaughtered and chilled in Chicago, to consumers hundreds of miles away. Inequality of land holdings in Brazil has increased greatly over the last few decades, with 70 percent of Brazilian farmers now landless and 81 percent of the farmland held by just 4.5 percent of the population (Hildyard, 1990). possible by the technology. They are useful but not definitive accounts. Research is critically needed on the ways consumer demand changes as income increases, the effects of national policies on patterns of production and consumer demand, the effects of agricultural intensity on economic growth and the environment, and the causes of shifts from more to less energy-and materials-intensive economies. In terms of CO2 emissions per unit of economic output, China is by far the world leader (National Academy of Sciences, 1991a). the structure of consumer demand, the population and resource base for agricultural development, forms of national political organization, and development policies. And the environmental effects of technology look quite different depending on the time scale being considered or the state of environmental knowledge when the analysis is done. Trees help to regulate the climate by absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere. Some point to "humanistic" values, derived from the Enlightenment, that put human wants ahead of nature and presume that human activity (especially technology) can solve all problems that may arise (Ehrenfeld, 1978). Dressed beef, which was cheaper than fresh beef for a variety of reasons, soon took the country by storm, driving many wholesale butchers out of business and giving the Chicago packing companies immense economic power. This effect was first hypothesized in 1974 by the chemists Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland of the University of California at Irvine, writing in the wake of the controversy over supersonic transport aircraft and with recent knowledge, developed through new detection technology, that CFCs were present in the atmosphere (Molina and Rowland, 1974). (Browder, 1988; Moran, 1976, 1990). Ranchers can take advantage of the highly productive first years after forest clearance to overstock the range and increase short-term profit. Learn more. An analysis anchored in the critical physical or biological phenomena can identify research traditions whose relevance to the study of environmental change might otherwise be overlooked. China and other rapidly developing countries will dominate carbon dioxide output in the 21st century. 1. Paleoclimatology can answer the question of anthropogenic climate change by using fossils to show links between global temperatures and CO2 levels, Seeing evidence of man-made climate change is difficult ‘when the details are buried under thousands of lines of computer code which implement algorithms of mind-numbing complexity'. Research at the global level is important but far from sufficient for understanding the human causes of global change. What national policies affect the likelihood that they will adopt such practices? Climate change deniers also confuse the argument by suggesting there is nothing we can do anyway. Source: Shine et al. If this hypothesis is correct, then political trends toward democracy, such as in Eastern Europe, will tend to reduce the amount of degradation resulting from economic growth there. moving from a concern with important changes in the environment to the identification of the human activities that most seriously affect those changes. And finally, there are intrinsic social limits. Mahar reports that a farm laborer can "net the equivalent of $9,000 from clearing 14 ha of forest, planting pasture, and a few crops for a few years, and selling the 'improvements' to a new settler" (1988:38). Beef production demands even less work per unit output and, with the help of modern technology and fossil-fuel energy for clearing forests, can be much more extensive than shifting cultivation. Bias toward growth and a hubristic disregard for physical limits, others have argued, are today the principal driving forces (e.g., Boulding, 1971, 1974; Daly, 1977). But other directions of investment, focusing on new manufacturing and expanded energy services such as refrigeration and personal transportation, would be much more energy intensive. By the time roads are constructed, most state land in the Amazon is already claimed (Binswanger, 1989). More intensive cultivation means that less forest must be displaced to meet human needs. Such cases need to be collected so they can be studied systematically and testable hypotheses derived about what kinds of innovations are likely to acquire the social momentum that produces long-lasting and increasing effects on the global environment, such as has resulted from CFC technology or from the Brazilian development strategy used in the Amazon Basin. For example, the world oil market is a global system in that changes in oil production anywhere reverberate through the system and may have global environmental impacts, for example, by changing the rate of consumption of oil or other fuels. Since 1750, humans have increased the abundance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by nearly 50 percent. In many developing countries, policies have favored extensive use of ''unused'' resources and "underpopulated" land to increase national power and improve the welfare of their citizens. Breweries and restaurants were the heaviest users of this stored winter ice, which was sometimes shipped hundreds of miles to provide refrigeration. An early estimate of the 100-year global warming potential of gas emissions in 1990 allocates it as follows: CO2, 61%; CH4, 15%; CFCs, 12%; N2O, 4%; other gases (NOx, nonmethane hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide), 8% (Shine et al., 1990). c Projected atmospheric effects depend not only on total production but also on the balance between end uses. Until almost the end of the nineteenth century, refrigeration was a limited technology, based almost entirely on natural sources of supply. We begin this chapter by outlining and illustrating an approach to accounting for the major proximate causes of global change, and then proceed to the more difficult issue of explaining them. Other greenhouse gases, such as nitrous oxide, stay in the atmosphere for a long time. Current impact is not the only criterion of importance. Better studies focused on the driving forces and their connections to the proximate causes are necessary for effective integrative modeling of the human causes of global change. Sign up for email notifications and we'll let you know about new publications in your areas of interest when they're released. Enough is known to identify some of the critical determinants of Chinese energy intensity, but not to quantify their effects or specify their interactions. These often meant monocropping, relatively low labor inputs, mechanization, and the maximization of short-term financial returns. Technological change affects the global environment in three ways. Thus, the current pattern of extensive development, by displacing indigenous peoples and small-scale extractors, has removed a brake on deforestation and threatens a store of valuable knowledge about the intensive management of forest species for human consumption. Causes of Climate Change. Global Environmental Change offers a strategy for combining the efforts of natural and social scientists to better understand how our actions influence global change and how global change influences us. However, under certain circumstances, a more centralized, state-controlled form of decision making might be better able to take a long-term and broader perspective. Economists note that disposal presents no important social problem if it is managed to reflect its true social costs and to be equitable in the sense that the costs are borne by those who generate the residuals. Air conditioning played a key role in the years following World War II in promoting urban growth in the region known as the Sun Belt, as well as in tropical areas around the globe. There is, however, one branch of science that can reliably give an answer that is easy to understand and hard not to believe. The empirical associations underlying some claims have also been called into question (e.g., Tuan, 1968, on White, 1967). For social scientific work to begin, it will be sufficient to know whether a particular human activity contributes on the order of 20 percent, 2 percent, or 0.2 percent of humanity's total contribution to a global change. Some human activities increase the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: Burning fossil fuels, eg coal, gas and oil - these release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, energy use is the product of population, per capita economic output, and energy intensity—that is, energy use per unit of output. ), types of actor (households, firms, governments), types of decisions determining the activity (design, purchase, utilization of equipment), or in other ways. within its area. The work can be eased by using the impact criterion: analysts might reasonably choose to move from trunk to limb to branch to twig only until the contribution falls below a preset level of impact for the time period of concern. The CFC case shows how the effects of human activities can look very different depending on the time scale used for analysis: a technology developed to refrigerate food had much wider global implications several decades later, after it was applied to refrigerating buildings. Moreover, because CFCs have contributed to social changes that are built into national building stocks, transportation systems, and even political structures (congressional representation from the Sun Belt, for example), the indirect effects of CFCs on climate change may be very difficult to reverse, even if substitutes are found that do not harm the ozone layer. The main reason for energy intensity, however, appears to be an inefficiency that has several contributing causes: Inefficient End Uses Coal burning in China is typically done in small, old units owned by households or small enterprises—characteristics that spell inefficiency. They illustrate how multiple driving forces interact to determine the proximate human causes of global change and why systematic social analysis is necessary for understanding how human actions cause it. The damage is now so extensive and severe as to preclude regeneration to original cover without special measures that are only now being developed (Uhl et al., 1989). Dependency theorists often overlook the role and complicity of national elites (Hecht and Cockburn, 1989). Over the near term, research on the human causes of environmental change should emphasize comparative studies of glob-. Second, it changes the efficiency of production and consumption processes, altering the volume of resources required per unit of output produced, the effluents and wastes produced, and the relative costs and hence the supply of different goods and services. The most widespread early refrigeration technology depended on compressed ammonia gas, which easily produced desired drops in temperature for effective food storage. For instance, the 1988 constitution provides that land ''in effective use,'' that is, cleared, cannot be expropriated for the purpose of agrarian reform (Hecht, 1989b). (1990:Table 2.8). First, even smoothly working markets are likely to produce undesirable outcomes. Another involves diffusion of production technologies across national boundaries, particularly from more-developed to less-developed countries: How do the environmental impacts differ between the innovating countries and the adopting countries, and how do the differences depend on the social organizations using the technologies (e.g., Covello and Frey, 1989)? More detailed analysis can be carried out until it no longer would provide information of high enough impact to meet some preset criterion. These greenhouse gas emissions have increased the greenhouse effect and caused Earths surface temperature to rise. Indeed, it is argued that once population has reached a level in excess of the earth's long-term capacity to sustain it, even stability and zero growth at that level will lead to future environmental degradation (Ehrlich and Ehrlich, 1990). But this projection is uncertain because of incomplete knowledge about the causes of that transition and the ways it might be altered by deliberate action. But because they do not know what the effect will be, they may not engage in transactions to maximize their preferences. The global environmental properties now of greatest concern include the radiative balance of the earth, the number of living species, and the influx of ultraviolet (UV-B) radiation to the earth's surface (see also National Research Council, 1990b). Frozen foods burst onto the American marketplace in the 1950s, as did fresh vegetables, dairy products, and other foods that are today accepted as ordinary parts of the national diet. And safer in a page number and press Enter sometimes offered as an indirect effect CH4... Whatever its size, it leads to new ways to discover and exploit natural resources combined heat and installations! 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