“We have experienced recently a life threatening, darkest period in our life. The deadly coronavirus pandemic, followed by a social pandemic. Nothing seemed to help lift our spirits in hope fo humanity.” Yuko Nii
Although scientists have been warning us for more than a half century that global warming causes climate change, we have ignored their warnings until it has started showing disastrous evidence in our lifetime throughout the world.
We tend to use global warming and climate change interchangeably, but we should be aware of the differences between these terminologies.
Global warming is a part of climate change, which is a broader term that includes the long changes to the earth’s climate system. Global warming is the rise in the earth’s average surface temperature. It’s caused by increasing amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuels.
Climate change can be caused by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation and agriculture. However, natural processes like volcanic activity, ocean patterns, and variation in the earth’s orbit can also contribute to climate change.
Questions: Witnessing todays’ worsening environmental disasters and the clearly divided social, economical, political world, are we facing the end of the world soon? Or, can we expect to see a brighter future in our lifetime? Learning about the past American history, we know that previous generations experienced unthinkable miseries in their life times, but they have overcome. What helped to improve the conditions? How did they resolve the hardships?
It is interesting to read what the American economists and environmentalist have stated in their positive outlook on the American economy based on the historical facts.
The 21st Greatest Century
The American Economist, Stephen Moore detailed the ways in which Americans were better off at the end of the 20th century, as paraphrased here:
The latter part of the 19th century was an era of tuberculosis, typhoid, sanitariums, child labor, child death, horses, horse manure, candles, 12- hour work days, Jim Crow laws, tenements, slaughter houses, and outhouses, lynchings. To live to 50 was to count one’s blessings. Their central premise
of this study is that there has been more improvement in the human condition for people living in the United States in this century than for all people in all previous centuries of human history combined. As we move into the 21st century, most Americas who are considered “poor” today have routine
access to a quality food, health care, consumer products, entertainment, communications, and transportation that even the Vanderbilts, the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and 19th- century European royalty, with all their combined wealth, could not have afforded.
Another American Economist and Environmental Optimist, Julian L. Simon, said that the human mind is the “ultimate resource’ and that humanity can overcome scarcity through innovation. He believed that human ingenuity is the ultimate resource that can lead to increase supply, greater efficiency, and the development of substitutes.
So: Joy to the World!
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