Mind Forest: Beneath imaginations - 시간의 토양에 기억의 나무를 심으며

The movie “The day after tomorrow” has been released recently. Even though the release time of the movie was a slack season, it has become popular among movie viewers. The movie is famous not only for the scale of the scenes, but for the likelihood of the situation in real life. Many meteorologists referred to the movie, and some of them told that it could be true. In other words, the situation in that movie is just a fiction, but it is a probable fiction . The movie briefs that the cold water from the melted glacier by the accelerated global warming changes the direction of ocean currents. Thus, the climate turned cold, and the next ice age has come. This is the synopsis of the movie; however, it is what is happening to us on the earth climate. It is changing in global scale.

Nowadays the extraordinary phenomenon in climate has become so common that people rarely pay attention to it. There are some examples: The distribution of trees in the world has changed gradually. The weather is getting warmer, so the distribution of tropical trees shows upward tendency. With the same reason, the amount of actual output from famous food districts is decreasing, and its decreasing rate is getting higher. The vacation season in Europe has changed as the hottest season comes faster than before. The purchase rate of air conditioners is sharply increasing in eastern Asia nations because its average temperature in summer is getting higher. The weather in Europe and America continent has also changed, and it has caused floods and tornados in recent summer.

When we think of the two most serious issues in the world, the first one would be the political tensions between nations over the limited natural resources and the spread of nuclear weapons, and another would be the environmental disaster caused by the destruction of nature . What is different is that the former is not fixed and unpredictable whereas the latter is inevitable. The climate changes are too fast to be prevented. This is why people are trying to adapt to the changed environment rather than stopping it.

Nevertheless, the speed of adaptation to the changed environment is not fast enough. Scientists believed that the changing speed would not be so fast. They assumed that it would be as same as that in ten years ago. However, it is clear that the changing speed is being accelerated. Some strong evidences prove it. However, many people still believe that the environment would not change easily. People underestimated the danger of the climate change for some reasons. First, the information about climate change is hidden to public because the government and the enterprises do not want to spend more of their fund to conserve the environment. Besides, people have tendency to stick to their fixed notion that climate would not change easily.

Thought there are many records to disprove their misconception, it is not enough to estimate the changing speed precisely or to persuade people. More bases are needed for proving the prevailing climate change because the meaningful climate observation usually takes long time and it is almost impossible to make a wide estimation when we use only the observation data. However, there is a strong tool to help the situation; it is computer simulation. Using computer simulation, estimating the speed of climate change in planet-wide scale is possible. It is a kind of indicator that can tell us about the instability of climate change.

In order to understand the principle of this simulator, we need to understand that the temperature of a planet has relations to 'Albedo' and 'the greenhouse effect.' Albedo is the reflection rate of a planet. It is based on the fact that a planet cannot accept all the energy from Sun because the atmosphere reflects some of the energy to the outer space. The greenhouse effect is another phenomenon that is caused by the atmosphere. Atmosphere stores heat and reflects the planet radiation to the land. These two facts are essential elements that decide the temperature of a planet. With those two variables and eccentricity, we can develop a climate simulator. The simulator tell us about the average temperature of the earth is almost 289K. It is roughly correct when compared with the observation fact.

However, it is easy to increase the average temperature of the earth. If we increase the reflection rate a bit (0.06 in numerical value), it sharply increases. This variation is within the limits of the forecasted value from observation about the warming gas. Look at the changing speed. It took only fifty years to increase 10K of the average temperature. This increase is big enough to change every coastline of the continents. The increase of temperature makes glaciers melt, and water from the glaciers causes the total amount of ocean water rise. Inferring from the altitude of the land, the lands whose altitudes are within five meters above the sea level will disappear by the rising of the ocean surface level. The simulation result predicts us that it will happen in fifty years.



In addition to this, the decrease of the global temperature is also highly probable. First, the simulation result shows that just a 0.02 change of albedo will lower the temperature, about 2K. This change can affect flora and fauna as well as the climate. The following simulation is based on a specific examination for concrete results. According to the observation about the glacial epoch, more than forty percent of earth was covered with ice. Using the concept of the movie 'The day after tomorrow,' we can suppose that the thirty percent of the earth surface is covered with ice, which is an unexpected fact for the simulation. In that case, albedo increases by 0.5. The result has an impact. The average temperature decreases nearly 10K within fifty years. The total decrease of temperature is over 15K, and the stabilized period is only for about three hundred years.


These simulation results show that the climate is very unstable. Just a small environmental change affects global temperature, and disrupts the balanced state. In light of the results that have been observed so far, the climate cannot maintain its stability easily. Humankind did not know about this. As a result, the environment is already broken with no possibility of restoration. Still yet, humankind is trying to prevent the global climate change by doing their best in the changed climate.

We need to make much preparation to protect the instability of the earth climate. Previously, the prohibition of using warming gas has been common . For example, people are advised not to use chlorofluorocarbon gas for the refrigerant, spray and fire extinguisher. By the way, scientists found that the ozone layer at the Antarctica had been already much broken. Freon gas has been known as the cause of such breakage. The chemical structure of chlorofluorocarbon is stable, thus the Freon gas goes up to the ozone layer, breaking into chlorines and reacting with thousands of ozone. For preventing the destruction of ozone layer, Montreal protocol came into effect since 1987. After that, the production quantity has been restricted and alternated with different chemical elements. Nevertheless, due to its high cost, some countries and enterprises still use Freon gas. Other nations have been trying to enforce the law. Nature friendly products have replaced many products using Freon gas. As in these examples, many things have changed.

Environmentalists insist that these efforts are too insufficient to save nature. Some environmental preservation associations emphasize that humankind must stop using fossil fuels which have been the main sources of power. Greenpeace, the biggest mass organization, has had the demonstrations for counter actions against the new exploration for oil . They support the next generation energy, based on the non-fossil fuels. However, such efforts cannot activate the development of substitute energy easily as the cost for the development and replacing the current commercial products with new ones are much higher than just using the traditional energy resources.

Fortunately, the developing speed of nature-friendly products is slow but on steady increase because of many binding climate agreements. Now nations prepare for possible emergency in the future. Kyoto protocol, which is based on capitalism, provides a rule for decreasing deflation of warming gas. Nations that succeed in decreasing the rate of warming gas deflation can sell their reserved amount of deflation to other countries. In addition, the nations, that fail to release less warming gas, can make up for a deficiency by purchasing the left deflation right from other nations as mentioned above. It is an efficient method to decrease the warming gas slowly in global scale.

However, it also has much more problems to deal with. Some powers have refused to accept this protocol. The United States that emits twenty-four percent of carbon dioxide declined the Kyoto protocol because they did not want to decrease their profit. Such selfishness is not only found in the agreements. Developed countries have started using this protocol as a trade wall to decrease their trade deficits. They can make a strict environmental standard for the imported products. Thus, many developing countries cannot sell their product without satisfying the developed countries' green wall. Besides, some countries never even joined those agreements. Despite the fact that many countries, nearly 160 countries, joined to the 'United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,' not many countries keeps the national agreement. Every nation moves for their benefit, not for the benefit of global environment.

For all these struggles, the main question is still left. Are we doing our best to prevent disastrous situations swiftly enough? As mentioned above simulations, it is NOT enough: it cannot be enough only with insignificant efforts! The earth climate is heavily unstable. In the meantime, developing countries have not considered the environmental preservation during their development-promoting periods. As a proper case, the environmental disruption of China is exorbitant. China is the biggest source that emit enormous amount of warming gases currently . Under the influence of thoughtless cultivation, the land of China is turning into desert day by day. Moreover, despite that their dam called 'three gorges' is still in development progress, it is already altering the surrounding nature, especially the ocean. It seems that their destruction has no limits.

The example above is just a sample of humankind's futuristic actions. Developed country will develop even the countries in Africa continent for obtaining fossil fuel . People believed that there would be little oil in Africa, however the multinational oil corporations have found that there is huge amount of oil deposits in Africa . To put it flatly, many African countries will be developed, causing much nature destruction as in China because such ways seem to be more lucrative than developing environment-friendly methods.

In conclusion, we have no one definite measure: humankind is already on a one-way track. It is unpredictable whether the speed of humans’ adaptation to the changed circumstances would be faster than the speed of the climate changes or not. In spite of such uncertainty, we know one thing for sure: at all costs, we need to save the earth.