Environment Portal

The National Academy of Sciences’ recent climate change findings and call to limit carbon emissions underscore the value of a just-launched survey assessing the workforce that monitors and measures greenhouse gas, according to survey co-sponsor Sequence Staffing, a leading executive search firm in the climate change field for more than 15 years.

Sequence and the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute last week launched their second international survey, “The 2010 Greenhouse Gas/Climate Change Workforce Needs Assessment Survey.” The survey asks leading climate change professionals to evaluate their industry’s ability to meet increasing global demands for professional greenhouse gas monitoring. Results of the survey are expected to be released by late summer. 

The National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, which led the study, on May 19 announced the need for greenhouse gas limits in major findings from the first three of five congressionally requested reports on climate change, together known as “America’s Climate Choices.”  The released reports cite strong scientific evidence that climate change is caused in large part by human activity and poses significant risk. 

The Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences are two of four independent nonprofits known as the National Academies that bring together committees of experts in all areas of scientific and technological endeavor to address critical national issues and provide policy advice for the federal government and the public. 

Neither Sequence nor the institute advocate a national policy, but they both hope their latest effort to poll climate change professionals about the needs within the greenhouse gas workforce will provide further insight concerning industry challenges, including increased global demands, professional training and standardization of monitoring, said Sequence Vice President Frank DeSafey. 

“Our focus is to acquire valuable data on the industry to better understand and quantify today’s complex needs for trained personnel measuring emissions and managing related climate change data throughout the world,” DeSafey said. 

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Sustainable development is a pattern of resource use that aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for future generations. The term was used by the Brundtland Commission which coined what has become the most often-quoted definition of sustainable development as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainable development ties together concern for the carrying capacity of natural systems with the social challenges facing humanity. As early as the 1970s “sustainability” was employed to describe an economy “in equilibrium with basic ecological support systems.” Ecologists have pointed to the “limits of growth” and presented the alternative of a “steady state economy” in order to address environmental concerns.

The field of sustainable development can be conceptually broken into three constituent parts: environmental sustainability, economic sustainability and sociopolitical sustainability

Scope and definitions

The concept has included notions of weak sustainability, strong sustainability and deep ecology. Sustainable development does not focus solely on environmental issues. The United Nations 2005 World Summit Outcome Document refers to the “interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars” of sustainable development as economic development, social development, and environmental protection.

Indigenous people have argued, through various international forums such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and the Convention on Biological Diversity, that there are four pillars of sustainable development, the fourth being cultural. The Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (UNESCO, 2001) further elaborates the concept by stating that “…cultural diversity is as necessary for humankind as biodiversity is for nature”; it becomes “one of the roots of development understood not simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence”. In this vision, cultural diversity is the fourth policy area of sustainable development.

Climate change is actually a tracking of weather pattern changes to the earth, or a specific region of the earth, over a period of time. This can include things like the average weather temperature, the seasonal changes, or weather events like hurricanes and other storms. More recently, climate change has been the buzz words around global warming. Global warming has become something of a hot button item with people taking sides on whether it is a real phenomenon or not. Because of this the term ‘climate change’ has been used as a more politically correct version.

More recently the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came up with this description of what climate change really means: “a change of the climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”

There are many factors to the cause of climate change. Some of these are the natural development of weather systems and changes in the earth’s atmosphere. The amount of radiation flowing from the sun can also affect the climate. Continental drift, greenhouse gasses, the Earth’s orbit, and severe natural occurrences; like volcano eruptions, can all change the climate in drastic or minimal ways.

For the last twenty years scientists have battled about the human effect on climate change. Currently, the majority of the scientific community are in agreement that the human influence on the environment has increase the momentum of the current climate change. It seems that science instead of arguing to try and prove the existence of climate change and global warming and now looking for ways to prevent catastrophic and irreversible damage to the environment.

Global warming is taking its toll on the world. How much do you know about global warming? Taking a global warming quiz can let you see just how much you know about global warming while allowing you to find ways to help prevent global warming. There are several facts that may surprise you about global warming.

For instance did you know that while natural forces are partly to blame for global warming that people are responsible as well? This piece of global warming trivia is something that is often overlooked. Our own creation of greenhouse gases is contributing to the continued warming of the planet.

When it comes to global warming the fact that China is the largest contributor of greenhouse gases is something else that isn’t very well known. What planets conditions are thought to be the result of too many greenhouse gases? This is another of the global warming trivia questions that are difficult to answer off hand.

Global warming trivia even extends to the appliances and fixtures in the home. Individual energy consumption can be reduced from sixty to eighty percent by changing a light bulb. Why is knowing this important? There are over a hundred thousand deaths around the world every year due to changes in the atmosphere from global warming.

A global warming quiz can test your knowledge about carbon dioxide and other deadly effects of global warming. Even if all greenhouse emissions were stopped immediately it would still be at least one hundred years before the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was completely gone. There would be decades after the last emission that the effects where felt.

The simplest explanation is that global warming is climate change in one direction. Specifically it is where net energy in the atmospheric system has increased sufficiently for a measurable warming. More energy in the system means that in many parts of the world it gets hotter.

One way that the Earth gets hotter is due to an increase in the atmosphere of gases that result in the greenhouse effect. The brief explanation of the greenhouse effect is that the wavelength of energy arriving on the Earth’s surface through the atmosphere is shorter than that reflected back towards space – a simple law of physics. Some gases in the atmosphere let the shorter waves through but block the longer wavelengths, so the energy is bounced back down to Earth, trapped, effectively heating things up.

In the absence of the greenhouse effect mother Earth would be frigid and the planet’s surface too cold for water to be liquid. The logic of this important phenomenon is that warming will happen when the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere increase.

And this is where the confusion comes because we have attributed the current warming trend to a specific cause – us.

But climate can also cool. This is because there can be a reduction in the net energy balance. During periods of lower atmospheric energy in the geological past, the surface if the Earth has been much cooler than the present. These periods were so cold that we called them ice ages, and there have been lots of them, some short, others long and intense.

So climate change means any change in climate conditions, warmer or colder. Global warming is a directional shift to a more energetic, hotter and more dynamic atmosphere. It is a phase of global warming that the scientific data suggest we are experiencing now.