I had written an article on the greenhouse effect. It was a year end article, they wanted me to pick out the most important scientific event of 1988, and I really thought the most important scientific event of 1988 would only be recognized some time in the future when you get a little perspective. But I thought the most interesting scientific event of 1988 was the way everyone started speaking about the greenhouse effect just because there was a hot summer and a drought, when I had been talking about the greenhouse effect for twenty years, at least. And there are other people who talked about it before I did, I didn't invent it. So, I explained what was meant by the greenhouse effect, and I explained that not only were we constantly pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because we're burning fossil fuels, coal and oil and gas, so that the content of the atmosphere as far as carbon dioxide is concerned has been going up steadily, not very rapidly, but steadily ever since 1900, and is continuing to do so. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now is 50% higher than it was in 1900. It's still only a little over three hundredth- 0.035%, which is not enough to bother us as far as breathing is concerned, but it's enough to trap the infrared waves that Earth reflects into space and to raise the temperature of the Earth slightly, and the temperature will keep on going up. And not only are we piling in more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we're chopping down the forests of the Earth at a great rate, and the forests themselves are the most efficient consumers of carbon dioxide that there are on Earth. Anything that substitutes for the forests, like let us say grain fields, or grasslands, are not going to consume carbon dioxide as efficiently. And if we replace them with desert, which is most likely, it won't absorb the carbon dioxide at all. So that in a sense we are contributing to the greenhouse effect in two ways: by pushing the output of carbon dioxide and inhibiting the input so to speak.
I said therefore, when Brazil begins to cut down the rainforest of the Amazon, not only is it destroying a habitat for vast numbers of plant and animal life which could be of great use to us, there are perhaps pharmacological products we know nothing about that are produced by these forms of life that if we knew about could advance the art of pharmacology and the practice of medicine, enormously. And we'll never find out, we're going to drive them to extinction. We're going to destroy the ground, because the soil of a rainforest isn't very good, and when you chop it down it doesn't make for good farming, what it makes is for good deserts. And finally, we're going to cut down on absorbing the carbon dioxide and on producing oxygen, so that we are actually tampering with the climate of the Earth and with the very atmosphere that we breathe, so that under those circumstances it is useless for Brazil to say that she can do what she wants with her own, that the rainforest belongs to her and if she wants to cut them down, she can. The rainforest doesn't belong to her, it belongs to humanity, she is merely the custodian of the rainforests.
...
Well, what we need is some sort of federal
world government and the only problem is how we manage to do that.
...
http://www.ubcome.com/AsimovSaveCivilization.html
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by TheCount
Connect With Us