Global Warming And Gas Transfer At The Air-Water Interface

On the eve of the year 2000, humans are now facing a major environmental crisis. The atmosphere and oceans are used as dumps, forests are being logged at rates of hectares per second, natural resources are being depleted, the best agricultural top-soils are impoverished or eroded away, fish stocks are decimated and animal species are disappearing at an alarming rate. We are now witnessing the most dramatic changes to affect the earth since the dawn of civilization and it is becoming obvious that the magnitude of the stresses imposed on the earth far exceed its capacity to self-regulate, except perhaps in the context of Lovelock’s (1979) “Gaia” hypothesis. Since the industrial revolution, humans have been blindly conducting a planetary-scale natural science experiment, and only recently have they been able to foresee some of the end results of this uncontrolled experiment.