Essay on friendship, essay on global warming
essay on friendship
Dorothy Jerrome's study of a clique of middle-class, middle-aged women is worth discussing more fully, as it is, from a sociological viewpoint, one of the most valuable accounts of friendship produced in recent years. More than most writers she is specifically concerned with analysing how the socially integrative features of friendship operate, and within this context emphasises the way in which friendships can promote a sense of individual worth and distinctiveness, without in any way undermining social identities whose roots are located within the broader social formation. The 'tremendous ten' was the name by which the group of eleven close women friends whom Jerrome studied referred to themselves.
essays on friendship
While the writers who argue this way are concerned principally with the United States, the image presented seems quite compatible with the portrayal of men's friendship ties found in much British social research. Here, too, there is little evidence in ethnographies or surveys (or, for that matter, in other sources such as fictional or autobiographical accounts), that men's social relationships typically involve very much intimacy or self-disclosure. As Hess has suggested, such patterns of friendship seem quite highly adapted to the demands that men's roles make of them in industrial societies. Men are supposed to be strong and self-sufficient, able to get along well with a range of others, yet not become dependent on them.
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As Williams emphasises, the forms of friendship developed by these outward moving working-class respondents were quite different from those reported by his other working-class respondents. Whereas these latter tended to restrict the scope of their non-kin sociability to specific contexts, mirroring the traditional workingclass pattern found elsewhere, the outwardly mobile respondents had a more diffuse, 'middle-class' conception of friendship. At least some of their friendships were not defined in terms of, or constrained by, a single context, but instead were activated more widely. Important within this, these people did not define the home solely as a preserve of the family or the kin group. Instead, friends were invited back to the home and were entertained in it.
essay on global warming
One recent study based on a relatively simple model found it possible that continued growth of chlorofluorocarbon production could produce a significant global warming by the year 2000, independent of the effect on ozone, merely because of a greenhouse effect in which those compounds would block outgoing infrared radiation. Changes in the radiationabsorbing and -emitting properties of the atmosphere not only change the direct radiation flows at Earth's surface, however; they also change the vertical temperature distribution in the troposphere and the stratosphere, which in turn changes the rate of vertical circulation. All of this could influence climate in ways that as yet defy detailed prediction.
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Whereas the importance to climate of processes high in the stratosphere has been appreciated only relatively recently, the relevance to climate of the condition of Earth's surface is more obvious. The most important features are: (1) presence or absence of water, (2) reflectivity, or albedo, (3) ability to transfer water to the atmosphere, (4) capacity to store heat, and (5) topography and texture. These interrelated features determine how much of the incident radiant energy is captured, how it is apportioned between surface and atmosphere, how the surface interacts with the winds, and how the shoreline interacts with ocean currents.
essays on global warming
Analytic and computer models of varying degrees of sophistication have been used to estimate what increase in the ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface would be associated with different degrees of depletion of the stratospheric ozone. Although the relation between ozone depletion and increased ultraviolet at the surface varies with latitude and other factors, a rough average is that a 5-percent decrease in ozone produces a 10-percent increase in radiation. The best-studied effect of such an increase is an increase in the incidence of human skin cancers, the magnitude of which is estimated to be about equal to the percentage change in radiation.
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Although an increase in skin cancer is the best understood of the effects of ozone depletion, it is by no means the only and not necessarily even the most serious such effect. Laboratory tests have indicated that increased ultraviolet radiation impairs the growth of certain crop plants and adversely affects a wide variety of organisms from bacteria to vertebrates. Phytoplankton, the primary producers at the base of oceanic food webs, may prove especially vulnerable if the light-receptors that trigger the protective dive response to excess radiation are not sufficiently sensitive to ultraviolet light. Furthermore, many insects "see" ultraviolet light and rely on it for navigation; interference with their pollination function is but one of several conceivable consequences for insects of an increase in ultraviolet intensity.
an essay on global warming
It has been widely surmised that the growing influence of civilization's particle production between volcanic eruptions has had a similar cooling effect, and, indeed, that this might be responsible for the apparent worldwide cooling trend observed between 1940 and 1965. (A widespread conjecture has been that an apparent global warming between 1900 and 1940 was caused by the buildup of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels, after which the cooling effect of particles became dominant and reversed the trend.) Considerable doubt has been cast on this point of view by growing understanding of the complexity of the interaction of atmospheric particles with radiation, and by a lack of evidence that increases in particles have been more than regional in extent.
essays on global warming
If there is any consensus on the likely overall direction of human influences on climate in the future, it is a shaky one to the effect that the dominant influence is or soon will be in the direction of global warming. The bases for this view are that the increase in carbon dioxide from human activities is global and consistently produces a warming effect, whereas the man-made increase in particles is regional and produces cooling or warming, depending on circumstances. That changes in patterns of circulation and the accompanying changes in precipitation and extremes of temperature are more important than changes in mean global temperature cannot be emphasized enough, however.
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If climate change is a historical fact and a future inevitability, why worry? The argument is often put forward that people have survived climate change in the past and will continue to do so. Moreover, the argument goes on, if civilization adds its own influences to natural climatic trends, how do we know the result won't be an improvement? The response to this has several parts. First, to talk merely of survival as a species is to evade the issue of the degree of social disruption and human suffering that have attended regional climatic change in recent history and, presumably, at times in the more distant past.