The Omnivore's Dilemma

  Michael Pollan,  in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, notes  that the farming industry’s role in global warming has  never even thought about  (Pollan, 198).  Pollan suggests  that the farming industry through some human activity has also contributed to the greenhouses gases effect that increases atmospheric temperature by less than a dozen digit degrees in centigrade or more  year after year. In my understanding, humans are not the only creatures that have carbon dioxide as a metabolism by-product. The carbon dioxide that is trapped in the atmosphere and bounces back to the earth’s surface because of some kind of a glass ceiling makes me think earth as big greenhouse. The truth, I can’t imagine a greenhouse as a big as a country, how much more for a greenhouse as a big as a whole planet. With the earth as a big as greenhouse, I wonder where the ecological balance comes in. I thought I learned in my science classes in high school that there were some mutual symbiosis between plants and animals, like Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm, for example.

Google came up with pages and pages of references in answer to my keyword search question.  The San Diego Public Library gave me ninety pages of search results and found over a thousand of books when I typed “global warming” as a search keyword. Typing “climate change” on the search keyword even found me more books: 1,508 total. I typed “Kyoto Protocol” on the search keyword and the library catalog found 25 items that contained my search keyword. Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement to limit global warming. Acknowledging that global exists, signatories of the agreement would limit emissions that would be trapped in the glass ceiling of the imaginary greenhouse that the world is made of. The trapped carbon dioxide emissions bounces back to the earth surface as heat and melts all the polar ice in Antarctica.

            The Grossmont Gateway to Research Library provided me the most substantial reference materials I never thought I could have accessed online through Google searches. I have saved on my desktop interesting studies about the Kyoto Protocol and how countries are. It is interesting to note that developed countries like Japan, Canada and European Union countries, except for the United States, have initially ratified the Kyoto Protocol (Freedman and Jaggi, 46). It was American scientists Roger Revelle and Han Suess, then both based in La Jolla’s Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who revived an article written by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish, in 1986.  The article that speculated on the measurement of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide against the earth’s average temperature was published in a philosophical magazine (Bailey, 348).

With the array of databases available for my topic, I find it a bit limiting at first to be allowed to use only ten of the reference materials I have gathered. But the ten databases I have chosen promise answers to the questions I have always asked about global warming. Why does the US government refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol? Why did Canada withdraw from being a signatory to the international agreement? What are the impacts of the Kyoto Protocol across countries? What is the 97% consensus? Why did Al Gore, a student of Roger Revelle ignore his former professor’s statement? Just before Revelle in 1991, he coauthored an article with another scientist and declared: “The scientific base for greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”

 

Works  Cited:

Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: New York Penguin Group, 2006. Print.

Gerlach et al. “US Rejection of the Kyoto Protocol: the Impact of Compliance and Cost of CO2  of CO2 Emissions” This paper was initially presented at the Stanford University Energy Modeling Forum (EMF) Meeting on Burden Sharing and the Costs of Mitigation, Snowmass, Colorado, August 6, 2001.

 

Sauquet, Alexandre. “Exploring the Nature of Inter-country Interactions in the Process of Ratifying Environmental Agreements” Public Choice April 2014 Volume 159 Issue 1/2, page 141-148. Pdf file.

 

Kumazawa, Riza et al. “The Effect of Kyoto Protocol on Carbon Dioxide Emissions”, Journal of Economics and Finance January 2012, Vol. 36 Issue 1, p201-210. Pdf file.

 

Urs Steiner Brandt et al. “Hot Air in Kyoto, Cold Air in the Hague—the Failures of Global Warming Negotiations. Energy Policy Volume 30, 2002, page 1191-1199

 

Friedman, Martin and Jaggi, Bikki.  “Global Warming Disclosures: The Impact of of Kyoto Protocol Across Countries”, Journal of International Finance and Management, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2011,  page 110-120

 

Munk, Walter H. “Tribute to Roger Revelle and his Contribution to Studies of Carbon Dioxide and Climate Change” The National Academy of Sciences  0027-8424/97 page 8247

 

Skuce, Andy. “Why the 97% Still Gets Challenge?” Corporate Knights Magazine Volume 13, Issue 3, page 70-71

 

Menchken, H. L. “Bill and Al’s Global Warming Circus”, The Forbes Magazine, November 3 1997,  page 246

 

Weart, Spencer. “Global Warming: How Skeptism Became Denial” Bulletin of Atomic Science, Volume 67, Issue 1, 2011, page 41-50