Custom essays on The Global Environment Outlook

The Global Environment Outlook is the survey under the United Nations Environment program. Every year this survey attempts to evaluate the state of our planet and to understand the dynamics, making the interaction of the environment and society the central point of the survey. The contributors of this survey try to use the reliable information and make grounded conclusion about the state of our planet. However, some skeptics consider this survey to be biased and insufficiently proven with the prolonged observation. This essay provides the comparison of the survey and the critical article with the personal conclusion about the objectivity of both works.
The state of the planet
Comparing the Global Environment Outlook and the critical article “Things are Getting Better” by Lomborg it can be concluded that no one of these two articles provides the accurate analysis of current environment state. Global Environment Outlook pretends to be objective and accurate: it provides many graphs reflecting the latest changes and trends in the state of environment. This information is really useful in some aspects: for example, it can hardly be denied that the demand on the fresh water grows with the Earth population, while the water resources shorten every year. Besides, the shortage of well-studies species really takes place as well as the declining of irreplaceable natural resources. However, the general conclusion of the survey seems some hasty. Survey claims:
“These unprecedented changes are due to human activities in an increasingly globalized,
industrialized and interconnected world (GEO 4, 6) Most of the data in the survey is related to the changes within the last two decades, so the term “unprecedented” seems to be arguable. Besides, the cause-affect relation between human activity and recent environmental changes can hardly be proved. The total period of human observation of the environmental situation is too short for providing the basic for such claims.
In his article Lomborg points out these issues and criticize the methods of statistic analysis used in the survey and other relative documents. He tells that such surveys are based on the assumption that all the current trends are negative because they started on the positive point and went down. However, more detailed research proved that the environmental situation isn’t so simple, and the data statistics in the survey is artificially adapted to the main idea if the survey. Lomborg cites the Norway Greenpeace activist Kalle Hestvedt, who claimed that the constant pressure made people thinking about the environmental issues more seriously:
“The truth is that many environmental issues we fought for ten years back are as good as solved. Even so, the strategy continues to focus on the assumption that ‘everything is going to hell’ (Hestvedt, in Lomborg, 18)” Unfortunately, Lomborg mostly refutes the conclusions of the survey instead of providing the accurate analysis of the state of the planet.
It is worth mentioning that the global conclusions on the base of local data are one of the popular trends in the today’s world. Thus, the famous movie “the Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore, former United States Vice President, was created on the same background as the GEO survey. The movie has received many different awards worldwide, including two Oscars, and provoked the vigorous reaction all over the world. Al Gore attempted to prove the inevitability of global warming provoked by human activity; however the skeptics and critics rejected most of his evidences. For example, Gore’s movie displays many graphics of Keeling curve reflecting the level of atmospheric CO2 from the middle of 1950th. Every year the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increases and Gore tells this is a real evidence of human impact on the environment. However, there is no evidence that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has to be invariable, that the constant growth of CO2 level is the direct result of human industrial activity, and that the CO2 level is the sole factor of global warming.
Besides, most of the recent articles and surveys don’t pay enough attention to the natural factors having an impact on the state of the planet. The activity of the small volcano in Iceland can change the environment faster than all the humankind.
“Gases from past large volcanoes have actually lowered Earth’s temperatures, triggered lung ailments, caused acid rain and thinned our protective ozone layer. (MSNBC, 2010 )” The main danger of the volcano activity isn’t the carbon dioxide, which is usually connected to the global warming, but the sulfur dioxide. “Because of its molecular structure, significant quantities of the compound can lead not to global warming but to global cooling.(Stone, 2010)”.
Thus, both of the articles mentioned in the introduction can be used as the sources of useful information and the food for thought, but they don’t provide the accurate analysis of the state of the planet.
This essay has shown that the observers and analytics our days haven’t the sufficient history of observation to make the correct conclusions about the state of the planet and its further perspectives. Both of the articles failed to provide the accurate environmental analysis. However, the impact of the human factor on the environment is obvious and it should be closely studied to prevent or change its possible negative consequences.