Conservation of Rainforests essays

Conservation of Rainforests essays The plight of the rainforests has not been "front page news" for several years now, due possibly to the media's incessant passion to cover events in the war against Iraq and terrorism. But the fact that rainforests are not headlines, as they were a few years ago, does not mean the problems facing these vital forests have gone away, or have been solved. Indeed, the rainforests are in dire straights, and must be protected, as the Dalai Lama states in the "Foreword" to Arnold Newman's book, Tropical Rainforest: "Resolving the present environmental crisis is not just a question of ethics but a question of our own survival. If we exploit it in extreme waysin the long run we ourselves and future There are ample reasons to be concerned about the health of Earth's rainforests, as this paper will report and analyze. But moreover, whereas the problem of global warming is affecting rainforests, on the other hand, the rainforests' which are burning are spewing millions of tons of carbon into the air, contributing to the problem of global warming. Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect The earth's temperature is definitely heating up, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (World Almanac, 2002); the average global temperatures between 1880 - 2000 rose from 56.65 degrees to 57.60 degrees. In fact (Newman, 127-128), "the 16 warmest years since record keeping began in 1860 have occurred since 1979, which may be unprecedented in the last 1,200 years," according to NOAA data that Newman retrieved for his book. James Baker, a NOAA administrator quoted in Newman's book, reports that as of the year 2000, the hottest year in recorded history was 1998, and the second hottest was 1997. "There is not time in recorded history that we have seen this sequence of record- setting," Baker explained. These data are "remarkable and sobering," he ...