Global Warming and Climate Change

About the Book

Global warming and climate change constitute the dominant environmental degradation threat currently confronting human society. Academic writings in the scientific literature, policy speeches at national and international forums, media publicity, etc.—all stress this fact: Global warming and climate change are no longer just a hypothesis, but an established fact whose symptoms are clearly visible in every continent and in all spheres of planet Earth’s environment. The major cause of global warming and climate change is human-induced GHG emissions into Earth’s atmosphere. Huge atmospheric concentrations of GHGs beyond the assimilation capacity of Earth’s atmosphere as a “waste sink” have transformed the chemical composition of the atmosphere, leading to global warming and climate change. The process of enhanced atmospheric GHG emissions began, in concrete terms, with the European Industrial Revolution starting in the mid-1700s and 1800s, which inaugurated so-called modern economic growth (Kuznets 1966), whose lifeblood, as it were, is fossil-fuel energy (coal, petroleum, natural gas). Combustion of fossil fuels to drive industrial growth, transportation and myriad domestic activities, agricultural modernization linked to heavy use of nitrogen-based chemical fertilizers, land-use change (specifically, deforestation, livestock production, forest fires, etc.)—all these have constituted the key sources of Earth-heating GHGs. This study seeks to pursue four broad objectives. The first is to explain how global warming and climate change constitutes a global environmental problem—that is, why and how the costs/damages arising from global warming and climate change are shared by the entire world community. The second is to identify, in concrete terms, and explain the specific human (anthropogenic) activities that emit the GHGs known to cause global warming and climate change. The third is to highlight the specific symptoms of global warming and climate change in.

About the Author

Enwere Dike, is currently a professor of economics at the Kogi State University in Nigeria. He holds the ingenieur ekon from Prague School of Economics, and Ph.D in Economics from the University of Notre Dame in the United States. Professor Dike worked briefly with the National Economic Research Associated, inc. (NERA) in Los Angeles, and also thought Economics at the California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, California before returning to Nigeria, his home country. He has thought in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Akwa, and Kogi State University. He has consulted for the United Nations Research Institute For Social Development (UNRISD), African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS), and Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Finance and National Planning. Professor Dike, is the author of Economic Transformation in Nigeria: Growth, Accumulation, and Technology, Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1991. His articles have appeared in African Development Review, International Business Review, Eastern Africa Economic Review, Technology and Development, and Nigerian Journal of Economic and Social Studies. He is married to Ngozi ( co-author of this work), and they have four children, and several grandchildren. Ngozi Dike, is the Chief Lecture in Environmental Biology at the Federal College of Education, Zaria, Nigeria. She holds a Bsc in Biology from the University of San Francisco, California, and PhD in Environmental Biology from Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. Dr. Ngozi Dike is a Director of Environmental Issues for the School of Science at the Federal College of Education, Zaria. She has published widely in International Research in Environmental Science and Technolgy, World Science Journal, International Business Research, and International Journal of Environment and Pollution. Apart from many chapter contributions in textbooks and conference proceedings, she is happily married to Enwere Dike ( above co-author).