Critical Review:

On development, demography and climate change: The end of the world as we know
it? Tim Dyson (2005)
Earth is now consistently increasing in temperature and began to receive a huge
amount of attention. In this paper, I will discuss Tim Dysons article On
development, demography and climate change: The end of the world as we know it?
written on 2005. Based on the research that intensively done for the past century,
scientists had found evidence of anthropogenic influences on climate change as both
evolved in times (Somerville et al., 2007). Scientists around the world have agreed
and firmly stated that earth is consistently warming due to human activities such as
burning of coal and fossil fuel, which have warmed the earth and dramatically
increasing convergence gases and trap the heat in atmosphere. This phenomena is
called global warming where the temperature of every atmosphere area, sea and earth
land increased. According to the IPCC report (2007), by the average, global
temperatures in earth surface have increased for 0.18C in recent one hundred year.
Originally, Dyson wrote this article in 2005 and the writer predicted 2010 as the peak
for the average temperature and Morice et al., (2012) has proved this in his study
where the warmest year of the entire series was 2010, with a temperature of 0.540C
above the 1961 - 90 mean.
In this article, Dyson attempted to provide five fresh perspectives on global warming
and climate change. Those five perspective were well constructed and the whole idea
of climate change was started with the history of energy use and how the evolutionary
of modern economic growth responsible for the mass exploitation of coal and fossil
fuel. Agreed by the statement, Stone et al., (2007) stated in their IPCC report that over
60year period since 1940, it is estimated that human had caused near to 100% of the
earth warming. During the 21st century, the CO2 emission together with demographic
factor had become the dominant driven factor for global warming. Due to the
warming and human activities pattern, Dyson tried to highlight the social reaction
from the general public on importance of reducing CO 2 emission by drawing the idea
and perspective of how fast our earth is changing based on regionals development
status. Besides of pushing the effort to inculcate awareness, this writer also tried to

bring the readers into the global issue where economic growth of each country plays
the important role of how they react to the evidence of global climate change. As
predicted, when discussing about the cooperation between numbers of large and rich
countries, this article inevitably raised the conflict of interest between those countries
that keep avoiding to bind agreement on global enforcement. By touching the part of
what is concerning the world to maintain its climate, Dyson also presented the
keypoints of what will happen to our climate in the future. It is strengthen by the
study of sophisticated computer climate models and how the illustrative future
population of each region on earth responsible for the regional heating and CO 2
emission. Apart from that, this article also debates the consequences of climate change
to several sectors like industry, agriculture, health, etc. More efforts on greater public
awareness and adaptive capacity would be beneficial to serve better coping
mechanism for the future.
In general, after summarizing Dysons main points, I shall be claiming that this article
succeed to deliver the main issue of how possibly human activities affecting the
climate change and how we should response to these changes. Although Dysons
managed to provide readers with sufficient amount of previous key study that
explaining the connecting evidence of current issue based on IPCC report, it is more
convincing if the writer can supply us with more case studies. However, all these
points by Dyson are something worth exploring and the main advantage of where the
writer did well is to raise from the smallest behavioral issue such as local awareness
until the largest one which is denial and avoidance conflict among countries that have
been significant barrier for the global enforcement. In concluding, I shall recommend
readers to deepen and understand the debate that writers try to deliver and as
responsible human being, it is us who makes things happen and we can start with
small step living the sustainable life by reducing the CO2 emission in our daily life.