● Kyoto’s mechanisms
○ Emissions trade => buying and selling of greenhouse gases emissions between industrialize countries or countries belonging to the Annex I of the Agreement Kyoto.
○ Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) => the governments and private sector companies of the industrialize countries can transfer clean technologies to developing countries.
○ Joint Cooperation => one industrialize country invests in other industrialize country to carry out a project to reduce the greenhouse gases emissions.
● Threats of the increase of the invisible gases, such as CO2.
- Greenhouse gases: they catch a part of the solar energy.
- Global warming: there is a 30% of CO2 in the atmosphere than when we started to burn en masse coal at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
- Climatic change: the global warming isn’t distributed uniformly in anywhere of the world.
- Meteorological changes
- Victims: the main victims will be developing countries with fragile infrastructures, for example flooding in Bangladesh.
● Reasons to worry us.
○ The concentration of the greenhouse gases has continued increasing => this can be due to human activities: cars, factories, rubbish and etcetera.
○ The climate changed during the last century: average superficial global temperature has increased between 0.3 and 0.6 Celsius degrees since the last years of the 19th century. The world level of the sea has grown up between 10 and 25 centimetres in the last hundred years.
○ There are studies which show the human influence on the world climate.
○ The climate will continue changing in the future => the change will involve: loss of animal species and plants, the level of the sea can grow up between 15 and 95 centimetres for the year 2100, more probability of torrential rains, droughts, flooding and etcetera.
● Evidences of the climatic change.
○ The big thaw => Alpine glaciers have lost the half of their volume since 1850.
○ Drought => There are some examples: Spain had 5 drought years since 1991. In Greece the volume of their longest river (Acheloos) decreased a 40%. In 1990s there were big droughts in South Africa.
○ Rise of the level of the sea and the temperatures of the oceans.
○ Effects on the wild life => the global warming affects to ecosystems, plants and animals in anywhere in the world. For instance, trees in Tropical Africa, Central America, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia grow up faster but they die younger.
○ Impacts on the human health => For example, doctors in Europe and North America consider that several thousands of people died of heart attacks and respiratory diseases caused by the heat waves of 1995. Besides there are a lot of cases of malaria (Africa), yellow fever (Ethiopia) and dengue fever (Costa Rica, Colombia and Mexico).
● I have only found reasons because of these the Agreement Kyoto must be come into effect as soon as possible. From my point of view I think that if we don’t carry out the agreement the life in the Earth can be intolerable in the next decades. We are contaminating too much the environment and this can cause the death of a lot of people due to heart attacks, respiratory diseases or other diseases. If we want to live in the best world possible, all of us must to contribute to get it.
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