About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

21 Tilburg L. Rev. 1 (2016)

handle is hein.journals/tiflr21 and id is 1 raw text is: TILBURG LAW REVIEW 21 (2016) 1-4 Tilburg Law Review BRILL NIJ H0FF brill.com/tilr Editorial Climate Change: Does Law Play A Role? The year 2015 faced extreme weather phenomena. People suffered from heat waves in India, the United States, and Alaska, or lost their houses or even families due to water floods in the United Kingdom, Bangladesh, and Chile. These weather phenomena are increasingly acknowledged as an effect of cli- mate change: a problem that by its very nature transcends national borders, i.e. legal orders, and thus falls perfectly under the international scope of Tilburg Law Review. When speaking of climate change, one automatically thinks of anthropo- genic global warming. Global warming entails the temperature increase on earth due to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect comes down to the following: The earth's surface absorbs light energy (solar radiation) from the sun and emits it as heat energy (infrared radiation) to the earth's atmosphere. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (such as carbon dioxide) absorb this heat and emit some of it back at the earth. Hence, the earth's atmosphere lets light in and out, but keeps heat trapped inside, just as a greenhouse. Without this greenhouse effect, the earth surface would be 15 degrees Celsius colder. As a consequence, humanity could not exist without the greenhouse effect. However, due to human activities the atmospheric concentration of green- house gases has increased. The combustion of fossil fuels for purposes such as electricity, heat, and transportation constitutes the largest source for greenhouse gas emissions, but also global changes to land surface, such as deforestation, account for a large amount of emissions. Because of this increase of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere absorbs and emits more heat back to earth, causing the earth surface to warm up, and resulting in extreme heat waves, water floods, and rising sea levels due to melting glaciers and ice sheets. However, extreme weather phenomena were not the only thing that climate change has given us in 2015. It also brought the United Nations Climate Change ( KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2016 1 DOI 10.1163/22112596-02101005

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most