We do not tread lightly on the earth, we children of this high-tech age. Our machines, which we have designed to help us live longer and more enjoyable and more carefree lives have damaged the world we live in, in some cases to the extent that the very good life that we have tried to engineer into being is itself in danger. We have for millennia increased the sophistication of our machines, but we have now come to a point in our historical and biological evolution that technology can most certainly not be counted upon to save us and we must ask ourselves very serious questions about what the relationship between technology and the environment is and what the future may hold for us. One of the most obvious cases of this all-too-potentially disastrous concatenation of technological developments and environmental constraints lies in the area of global warming. This paper explores how societies are attempting to grapple with the climatic and environmental changes that human technologies have set into motion by examining the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, an accord that the Bush Administration has refuted while many other nations seek to save all of humanity by adhering to.
To understand the need for an accord like the Kyoto Protocol and the seriousness of the United States's refusing to follow its provisions, we must understand first something about the physical forces of global warming and the changing effect of technology on the environment since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. This is not to say that there were not significant effects on the environment before the Industrial Revolution (the most important of these being the result of agrarian reshaping of the land) but it was at the point of the Industrial Revolution that the impact of human technology began to speed up so dramatically - and in many cases so drastically.
We should here define what we mean by global warming. It is simply an increase in the earth's temperature ...