Similar accounts should be made for the human contributions to other problems of global change. It is critical to develop reasonably accurate assessments of the relative impact of different classes of human activity as proximate causes of global change. zon projects against taxable income earned elsewhere (Browder, 1988). There is sometimes reluctance to take experts' words for anything and so we would like to be shown the evidence. Driving forces generally act in combination with each other. References. The net effect on hu-. These estimates are of "radiative forcing" by greenhouse gases, that is, the change they produce in the earth's radiative balance that in turn changes global temperature and climate. The difficulty lies in predicting future human activities, particularly the invention and adoption of new technologies. Population growth increases the demand for food, which creates pressure to make agriculture both more intensive and extensive. zonian land use in a positive way (Schmink and Wood, 1987:50; but see Price, 1989). In such a regime, large-scale clearing, which reduces evapotranspiration per land area even if trees are replaced by other vegetation, will decrease rainfall downwind. Several critical topics for research are obvious: one involves com-. Urban brewers, especially in the warm climates of the South, were the first to make wide use of it. More intensive cultivation means that less forest must be displaced to meet human needs. We can distinguish three types of global-scale analysis: aggregate, systemic, and comparative. Enterprises that could compete by using energy more efficiently do not have incentives to do so. Economic growth can proceed with decreasing energy intensity because of shifts of production from industrial to service sectors and adoption of more energy-efficient processes and technologies (World Resources Institute and International Institute for Environment and Development, 1988:114); energy use per capita, however, has continued to increase in these countries (World Bank, 1989:173). But other important energy-productive investments do not fit these priorities. In the presence of sunlight, CFC molecules became chemical agents capable of destroying many times their number of ozone molecules. ), sectors of an economy (transportation, industrial, etc. Since the conversion of inputs to useful outputs is never entire, it is fair to say economic activity inevitably stresses the environment by generating residual wastes. Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email. Because of these linkages, hu-. More complex mutual causal links also exist among several driving forces. For interpretation of the data, see the note at Table 3-1. sonal transportation) than for explaining the choice or operation of water heating systems for buildings. Between 1965 and 1987, Chinese coal use—and CO2 emissions—increased at the same rate as total economic output. a Estimates of N2O emissions are highly uncertain. A third concerns the commonly alleged short-sightedness of corporate decisions about the environment. A possible result is more rapid growth of greenhouse gas emissions than would otherwise be the case. But the very stability that made CFCs so attractive for so many applications proved finally to be their greatest hazard. First, even smoothly working markets are likely to produce undesirable outcomes. In the second, technological innovation and adoption are. That will require further research. Thus they can provide high, reliable, sustainable production from smallholdings with high inputs of household labor and little capital or fossil fuel energy. For 50 years, they seemed a perfect example of a benign technical solution to environmental and engineering problems, with no negative side effects of any kind. The human impulse to want more of the material things of life appears to be deep-seated, and the areas of the world in which people are most lacking in material goods are those with the greatest—and most rapidly increasing—population. Species with wide ranges are unlikely to be extinguished by habitat destruction within their range, but such destruction is likely to eliminate entirely the habitats of some of the species in the area with smaller ranges. 5. The model has been criticized as imprecise in that the notion of unequal terms of trade is inadequately defined. coal reserves, after the Soviet Union and the United States, but is very limited in reserves of other fossil fuels (Xi et al., 1989) and lacks the capital for major investments in nuclear power or development of its large, but inconveniently located, hydroelectric potential. 3. Extensive, extractive. A range of other factors in addition to dependency must be considered to account for the variety of resource use patterns in the Third World. Can population growth occur without major environmental damage? b Source: Shine et al. Deforestation reduces diversity at all three levels. Analyses of such relationships may use globally aggregate data or local and regional data linked to the phenomena of interest. Current markets have no sure way to anticipate, and therefore reflect, the value future generations will put on the depleted resources. China and other rapidly developing countries will dominate carbon dioxide output in the 21st century. ), purposes (locomotion, space heating, etc. And it does not acknowledge the existence within fully integrated market economies of stable, intensively producing family farmers and smallholder land-use regimes that modify but do not permanently degrade their habitat. 4. The very form of the post-World War II city, with its tall office buildings, fixed windows, and energy-intensive controlled climate systems, presumes a significant commitment to refrigeration and cooling. The largest speculative gains accrue to large investors with good connections in government and the courts because the value of land is greatly influenced by "institutional factors such as validity of title, [and] access to credits" (Hecht, 1989b:229). 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. From national economies to personal lives, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 placed ... Top News Videos for 3 human causes of climate change. In the United States, 85 percent of coal is burned to generate electric power, at an average efficiency of 36 percent. Three-quarters of the Chinese emissions come from burning coal. TABLE 3-6 Energy Intensities in Selected Countries and Groups of Countries, 1987. a Kilograms of oil equivalent per U.S. dollar of GNP. From Florida to Texas to southern California, the massive influx of new residents depended in no small measure on the ability of buildings to protect their occupants from summer heat. That the Montreal Protocol and the later, even stronger London amendments to it could be signed even in the absence of environmentally benign alternatives to the CFCs suggests people's perception of how serious and urgent the problem had become, but also their faith—encouraged by DuPont's actions—that alternatives would in fact be available by the time the agreement's deadline fell due. To estimate the size of any such effect, it is necessary to have studies at the national level. They do not hold that other factors are unimportant in placing stress on the earth's resources and on the biosphere, only that population growth must be considered primary, because if all other factors could be made environmentally neutral, population growth of this magnitude would still spur resource stress and environmental degradation. Thus, energy use is the product of population, per capita economic output, and energy intensity—that is, energy use per unit of output. Projections of future production are very sensitive to changes in economic growth, and relatively quick substitution is possible when alternative chemicals become available. Under those conditions, an individual or functional group of individuals with a large area requirement is less likely to find adequate forest resources. Clearly, political-economic institutions can affect the global environment along many causal pathways. In addition, development policy around the world has supported capital-intensive development of export monocultures. egies of mixed development as an alternative way of using the forest for human needs. The upward trend in CFC production was also aided by the development of still other uses for CFCs: as nontoxic propellants in aerosol sprays and later, in the 1960s and 1970s, as solvents in the manufacture of integrated circuits. Source: Compiled from Tables 3-1, 3-2, and 3-3. According to many peer-reviewed studies, over 97% of climate scientists agree that human activity is extremely likely to be the cause of global climate change. Modern technology is seen as a much more significant contributor to environmental degradation than either population or economic growth. Economic growth also depletes the stock of nonrenewable natural resources such as coal, oil, natural gas, and metallic minerals and, in some cases, the stock of renewable resources as well, as when the rate of soil erosion exceeds the rate of restoration of soil and nutrients. They also show that studies of driving forces and their relationships have been and can be done (National Research Council, 1990b; Turner, 1989). (1990); for N2O, National Academy of Sciences (1991a). But a closer look at the relationship of energy use and GNP gives a different picture—one that puts much more emphasis on technology and its social control. In addition, policy responses, particularly mitigation responses, require understanding of the activities that drive global change at the level at which the responses will be made. Although the principle of mechanical refrigeration, in which compressed gas was made to expand rapidly and so lower temperatures, had been known since the middle of the eighteenth century, its first application on a large commercial scale was not found until the second half of the nineteenth century (Anderson, 1953). This research helps clarify how much growth is more or less inevitable because of the momentum built into the age structure of the world population. This is a serious limitation because, for environmental resources such as the stratospheric ozone layer, the only markets are imperfect. In the United States, debates about apportioning government energy research funds between nuclear, fossil, conservation, and renewable energy development have always been, in part, debates about the effect of these technologies on the environment. Only a handful of empirical studies have examined the effects of population growth on the environment, and many of these are quite dated [e.g., Ridker, 1972b; Fisher and Potter, 1971). Comparisons between countries or localities or of the same place at different time periods can show why some social systems produce as much human welfare as others with less adverse impact on the global environment. The credits were so attractive that money flowed from the nonagricultural sector into extensive ranching (Binswanger, 1989). These often meant monocropping, relatively low labor inputs, mechanization, and the maximization of short-term financial returns. It seems that past some point, consumers use their economic resources to purchase well-being that is decreasingly dependent on material goods (see Inglehart, 1990). Scientists know much about the technical changes that could mitigate China's greenhouse gas emissions, but they have relatively little quantitative understanding of the social factors that make possible, and interact with, technological change. The source of controversy centers around more complex questions. The most widespread early refrigeration technology depended on compressed ammonia gas, which easily produced desired drops in temperature for effective food storage. Subsequent scientific investigations soon led to what is now the most widely accepted explanation of what was happening. Diversity is vulnerable to drying of the regional climate, because evapotranspiration from the forest generates about half the rainfall in the Amazon Basin (Salati and Vose, 1984).2 Deforestation can damage biological diversity by contributing to both global and regional climate change, especially if the result is a drier climate in the Amazon Basin. Major human proximate causes, such as fossil fuel burning, are conducted by many actors and for many purposes: electricity generation, motorized transport, space conditioning, industrial process heat, and so forth. oped countries. First, it leads to new ways to discover and exploit natural resources. The CFC story demonstrates the tremendous difficulty of understanding the environmental effects of technological change. Although China cannot be expected to increase its energy productivity 2.5 times to India's level—the ample availability of low-cost coal in China gives it less incentive to economize on energy—it seems to have room for huge improvements in efficiency. The tree structure can be elaborated further by dividing the subsidiary proximate causes defined at the previous level into their components. Is it human cause or is a natural process that is happening? The extensive clearing of forest on the frontier reflects population pressure and food needs outside the local region, combined with a lack of population pressure locally (Denevan, 1981). 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. Air conditioning became a fact of life in such places, so much so that it is hard to imagine urban life in the Sun Belt without it. Such studies should be specific at first, focusing on the alternatives available in a particular place and time, and should examine the technologies as they are implemented in actual social systems rather than under idealized conditions. emissions may change considerably if centrally planned economies become extinct. Also, the long-term effects on the global environment of a technology such as refrigeration with CFCs have been much different from the effects over a shorter time span—not only because of increasing use of the technology, but also because of the secondary effects of migrations made. As tree diagrams move from the trunk out toward the branches and twigs, analysis depends more on social science. Perhaps the most valuable research over the near-term will come from comparative studies that involve either a large number of representative data points or a smaller number of selected regional case studies from around. And an observed trend in the United States, in which the main source of pollution has shifted from production activities to consumption activities, has effects on the overall economy-environment relationship that are not yet clear (Ayres and Rod, 1986; Ayres, 1978). These systems may also help preserve mature forest ecosystems from destruction by reducing development pressure on them (Anderson, 1990). These contradictory arguments, all plausible, can be weighed only by research that is specific (e.g., which technology, in which society, at what time) and that takes into account the other major social forces that cause or are affected by technological progress. The priorities are urban air pollution, freeing rail cars for noncoal cargo, and reduction of sulfur oxide emissions. 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. The history of CFCs demonstrates, above all else, that human activities can have quite unexpected long-term effects on the environment. Toxicity and the need for large expensive compressors kept mechanical refrigeration from making headway with retail customers, who represented an immense potential demand. China has the world's third largest. Climate change, the periodic modification of Earth’s climate caused by atmospheric changes and the atmosphere’s interactions with geologic, chemical, biological, and geographic factors. If per capita income grows rapidly there, Chinese emissions may increase enough to become tremendously important on a world scale. An economy heavily weighted toward services appears to generate fewer wastes and less resource depletion per unit of output than one weighted toward manufactured goods. One reason is that modern technological innovation progresses much faster than knowledge about its damaging effects, both because the effects are intrinsically difficult to understand and because the powerful economic interests that benefit from new technologies influence research agendas to favor knowledge about the benefits over knowledge about the costs (Schnaiberg, 1980). For instance, climate influences the distribution of vegetation on Earth’s surface (e.g., deserts exist in arid regions, forests in humid regions), but vegetation in turn influences climate by reflecting radiant energy … called climate change. However, many governments, primarily in the West, have also enacted policies to ameliorate the effects of industrial growth on the environment. ample, if it alters the earth's ozone layer. Obversely, which short-term changes are likely to disappear over time? Where controversy tends to arise is over the relative primacy and hierarchical ordering of attitudes and beliefs relative to other causal factors, especially the degree to which beliefs and attitudes can be given causal force in their own right or are products of more fundamental forces. For example, human actions that may be proximate causes of irreversible environmental change must be considered important beyond the magnitude of the change they may cause. They argue that the doubling of the world's population in about one generation accounts for a greater proportion of the stress placed on the global environment than has increased per capita consumption or inefficiencies in the production-. 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. Dire warnings of imminent human-induced climate disaster are constantly in the news but predictions of the end of the world have been made throughout history and have never yet come true. Linking time scales is also critical to the global change agenda. favors heavy industry on ideological grounds. Ice is melting worldwide, especially at the Earth’s poles. When such a variable has a high impact, it is worth considering for inclusion in models of the relevant proximal causes of global change. Careful comparative studies of the social determinants of energy intensity and changes in energy intensity at the level of nation-states are critical for understanding and projecting China's future contribution to the greenhouse effect. No less importantly, the nontoxicity of Freon made it possible for refrigeration technology to be applied to the ambient cooling of buildings, so that air conditioning came to be an ever more important market for the gas. Over the near term, research on the human causes of environmental change should emphasize comparative studies of glob-. Larger landholdings bring more extensive use. Thus, a high-priority study might be one that focuses on a country or activity that by itself contributes significantly to global change; or one that is expected to generalize to a sufficient number of individuals, firms, or communities to matter on a global level; or one that illuminates variables that explain important differences between actors at the chosen level of analysis. For each important environmental change, there are several possible accounting trees, each consistent with the data but highlighting different aspects of the human contribution. man action at one level of aggregation may depend on events at another level. The result has been impressive in building demography as a respected, interdisciplinary field within the social sciences, and in gaining knowledge of the causes of population growth. They argue that the capitalist, cash-based market system rewards those who exploit the environment for maximum short-term gain, an incentive structure fundamentally at. The rapid increase in Chinese coal consumption—from 62 million tons (Mt) in 1952 to 812 Mt in 1985—can be traced to industrialization, electrification, and population growth (Xi et al., 1989). Depending on the topic, it may be important to conduct studies at the level of the nation-state, the community, the industry, the firm, or the individual. Although these questions are very important for analyzing human-environment interactions, most current analyses of the effects of economic growth and environmental quality are based on conventional definitions of economic activity. Researchers should study the causes of major environmental changes both globally and at lower geographic levels. Previously, consumers had bought their refrigerated food at the store just before eating it, since efficient and reliable household refrigeration was not generally available. There are many “natural” and “anthropogenic” (human-induced) factors that contribute to climate change. 7 days ago. Clearing of tropical forests is generally considered to be the most important single cause of recent losses in the earth's biological diversity. But natural ice was unreliable: two warm winters in 1888-1889 and 1889-1890 brought partial failures of the ice crop that encouraged the packers to turn to a more reliable form of refrigeration. By drastically lowering the rate at which food decayed and hence making perishable crops available to consum-. The threatened ecosystems provide regionally important services, such as creating soils, moderating temperatures, reducing soil erosion, cleaning the air and water, and preventing flood and drought (Smith, 1982). Some observers point to modern strat-, Low average yields, high variability, low crop diversity, High average yields, low variability, high diversity (cereals, tubers, vegetables, trees, livestock), Small, balanced fragmentation anti accretion, Low total inputs, seasonally variable, unskilled, high returns per hour, often hired, High total inputs, steady inputs throughout year, skilled, low returns per hour, often household, Mechanical, energy imported, nonrenewable, capital intensive, Simple, often manual, energy local, renewable, labor intensive, High, output sold, inputs largely purchased, national and international commodity markets, Subsistence combined with cash production, not totally dependent on market prices, some purchased inputs, Private, land values speculative but initially low, legal access politically determined, Private and common property rights, land values high, inheritance important, legal protections, High, growing polarization, landlord elite and landless wage laborers, Moderate, stratified, smallholders significant, social mobility, Degradation, decline in biodiversity, nutrient loss, Sustainability, fertility renewed, conservation. 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