Some Global Environmental Issues of Public Concern

Abstract

In this talk I will pick three key environmental issues that dominate the risk or impact, or dominate the public perception thereof: (a) What is the effect upon health of particulate air pollution at today's levels? Experts increasingly believe that fine particulates kill 70,000 people a year in the USA, but this has not yet been officially admitted by any government. (b) What is the effect of increased carbon dioxide emissions, from burning fossil fuels, on global climate change? There was intense government attention at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, in Berlin in 1995 and in Kyoto in 1996. The estimates of the International Program on Climate Change (IPCC) have changed but remain disturbingly high. What should the world do about it all? (c) I will briefly discuss another global environmental effect: the pollution of water supplies, particularly in the Bengal Basin (West Bengal and Bangladesh) by arsenic and the implications this has for the world. I conclude with an argument for the future. Contrary to the defeatist (Luddite) attitude toward technology that many non-technologists have, I argue that the future of the human race demands an active intervention by people, to prevent such catastrophes as the Black Death (which probably reduced the population to one third) and all-out nuclear war.