TermTest1

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School

Toronto Metropolitan University *

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110

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Information Systems

Date

Oct 30, 2023

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Uploaded by PresidentMoon265

Term Test 1 Q:1-3 By: James Mohrhardt 1. Starting off with the Engineering Paradigm, so as we know this goes back to the pre 1950s where structures, damage control and protection was the three main key elements. This is very beneficial for the people/ habitants in a good way due to maximizing security and strength in all resisting aging of structures. A clear example is the earthquake resistant buildings that started at least 2000 years ago which we still have problems with today. The downside to this paradigm is the environment isn’t taken into account for due to the large amounts of CO2 gas emissions from all the construction and forests taken down to put up the different buildings, and different types of protection for humanity. Secondly, the Behavioural paradigm was known as the “dominant” one between the four. Thi s was due to the human ecology approach. The thing that makes this one pop out from the rest was how it was a learning paradigm and how it always depended on what happened in the past to act on it in the now. This is very beneficial due to already having past experience with what will happen to prevent it from happening again. It gives every individual/ human individual choice to deal with the risks that will happen and when to take care of it. The downside is that if the people always act and depend on the past, when there is a problem that is happening with no previous disasters or documentation. This leads to the future of unknown which is bad because there will be no way of handling the situation properly. Next, we have the Development paradigm, and this was part of the time where humanity must focus on vulnerabilities that exist in everyday life. This is a great way to go by because if we have all our focus on the reasons why they exist or what is the trigger in the natural environment. We will ultimately know the reasoning behind global situations and come up with answers. The downside to this paradigm is marginalization, in other words when people are unaware of the environment they don’t know how to react and can cause more damage than good. Ultimately creating or forming unexpected new rareness or extremes that have not been covered yet. Lastly, the Complexity Paradigm is a combination of all the previous great parts included all in one. Merging of the natural and social sciences behind everything that was documented and learned. This is a great strength because with all knowledge combined this will make for less unknown hazards and complications for climate change if done correctly. Although a combination of all four, there are still some downsides to this. Since we rely so much on what we already know, the disasters that happen must be human/ society made problems. People are not just victims; they also contribute huge amounts od problems/ disasters to the environment. The paradigm that contributes the most to reducing disaster losses is the Behavioural Paradigm. We can clearly see that since humans like to depend on what they already know, and they have a choice if they want to deal with it or not. This shows that if the society sees something as a disaster, they just wont go through with it due to having a choice to avoid it. Creating more safety than hard to the world as a whole.

2. A global trend that exists in the human and economic costs of disasters is weather and climate change. These two disasters go hand in hand due to how one acts on one another. Since we know that climate change is rapidly becoming worse and worse due to all kinds of emissions given into the atmosphere, its costing a lot more to reverse the problems done in the past. Even now we are creating lots of new problems arising and its getting out of hand to the point where we don’t know if it will even be reversible. These trends exist due to human capability to change the earths external structure. Altering, changing, and innovating new ways to facilitate human experiences but not keeping in mind the damage that facilitating causes. What can be seen from all this, is a combination of factors that lead up to this event that we have now, and its not getting better but worse. The challenge is to estimate how much has been affected in an individual events magnitude or probability of occurrence. Therefore, these trends exist due to society trying to make advancements while unknowingly causing more damage than good for the environment as a whole. An example that shows these trends are the summer heat waves in Europe like of 2003. This really shows how weather and climate change work together and cause the entire part of Europe with tremendous amount of heat that affects everyone all at once. Lastly, a final example of this would be developing countries between 1995 and 2015. During this time period there were higher fatality rates and economic losses as a proportion of GDP. 90 percent of the deaths were from natural hazards/ disasters occurred within the specific countries.

3. Climate change is constantly being affected by radiative forcing, which is something that quantifies the change in energy cause by the drivers of climate change relative to 1750. There are two types of radiative forces: the positive and negative. The positive will lead to surface warming and cause the atmosphere to get hotter. The negative, which is contradictory to the positive, will cool down the atmosphere instead of uprise of global warming. This has lead up to an uptake of energy by the climate system and we can clearly see by charts of over the years that is exponentially increasing. The largest contributor to total radiative forces are caused by increase in atmospheric concentration of CO2 since 1750s. This is alarming since we know that the total radiative forces have been rapidly increasing without a break since 1970 and continuing on up until the present. It is very clear that human interference has had a big impact on the climate system. These are shown in many different ways, from warming the atmosphere and ocean, changes in global water cycle, reduction over the years in the amount of snow fall and ice and many more instances. The response from climate change usually falls into two categories, either mitigation or adaptation. Mitigation is to minimize impact we have on climate change and address causes. On the other hand, we have adaptation, which is minimizing the impact climate has on us, addressing the consequences. The change that we see from these two causes scenarios in which the temperature changed caused by green house gases are kept to 22 degrees to preindustrial levels, and to have CO2 concentrations of 450ppm in 2100. To get this information to become a reality there must be a huge cut in green house gases and CO2 emissions by at least 2050. Therefore, meaning that we need to lower 40-70 percent of emissions in 2050 relative to 2010.

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