Media Coverage on Public and Ethical Concern Essay

Media Coverage on Public and Ethical Concern - Essay Example It made the US government believe in a concept known as the domino theory. The paramount idea in this discourse was that if one Asian nation fell to the leftist ideology of communism, others would quickly follow. Historically speaking, the year of 1954 had seen the Communist forces in the north of Vietnam, led by Ho Chi Minh, defeat the colonial French rule in Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh chartered a policy whereby Vietnam was divided into a pro-American Southern and a communist northern bloc with a demilitarised zone (DMZ) in the middle. Though, Ho Chi Minh had intended to bring the two sections under one government by a common rule of the ballot, it never really happened. On the contrary, the communist forces began a guerrilla war against the south. This tempted the US government to launch a battle in Vietnam in order to curtail what it believed to be the rise of Soviet communism. If from the point of view of Utilitarianism, the ethical doctrine that holds that the moral worth of an action is solely determined by its contribution to overall utility, we make an effort to justify the war, we realise that even then the action of the US government was really uncalled for. The US government's stubborn grit to win the war rose to such a level that even the basic tenets of virtue ethics were debunked. In trying to be utilitarian to their cause, the US army indulged in the horrendous crime of using herbicides in order to defoliate large parts of the countryside. These chemicals played havoc, and still continue to do so, in destroying the landscape, causing hereditary diseases, birth defects and poisoning the food chain. It is estimated that during the years of 1961-1962, the Kennedy administration authorised the use of chemicals to destroy rice crops. Between 1961 and 1967, the U.S. Air Force sprayed 20 million U.S. gallons (76,000 m) of concentrated herbicides over 6 million acres of crops and trees, affecting an estimated 13 percent of South Vietnam's land. In 1997, an article published by the Wall Street Journal reported that up to half a million children were born with dioxin-related deformities, and that the birth defects in southern Vietnam were fourfold those in the north! No amount of utilitarianism can justify this mass killing. Similarly, the war showed how the entire corpus of reason and Kantian deontology was done away with by the US army operation in Vietnam. As General Maxwell Taylor, one of the principle architects of the war noted First, we didn't know ourselves. We thought that we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies .... And we knew less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this kind of dirty business. It's very dangerous. Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense, was even more blunt. When asked to comment on his role by the London Observer, he replied "I was wrong! My God, I was wrong! Thus, the war clearly defeated the utilitarian purposes it stood for. Moreover, the fact that it cost the American government more than $120 billion, apart from vehement protests and scorn the world over, illustrates the fact that the Vietnam War was definitely a grave error

Global Warming is real Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Global Warming is real - Research Paper Example The resulting rise in sea level is causing tsunamis to occur and has also endangered the survival of many animal species on earth. The question that has, in recent years, attracted the attention of scientists all over the world is, if the global warming is on a rise, and if so, to what extent are humans responsible for that? As fossil fuels burn, the carbon they contain gets converted into a greenhouse gas, known as carbon dioxide (CO2). Such greenhouse gases as methane (CH4) and CO2 entrap the sun’s energy into the atmosphere. There has recently been a tremendous emphasis on reduction of the fossil fuels use as they are thought to be the most fundamental cause of increase in global warming. In this paper, the question noted above has been answered with support of scientific studies to show that global warming is a real issue. According to the meteorites’ radioactive dating, it has been 4.6 billion years since the solar system of which earth forms a part has been found. Examination of the minerals preserved in earth and the scientific study of rocks has shown that earth has contained liquid water for 4.3 billion years (Watson and Harrison). Since then, climate of earth has largely remained stable, with occasional freezing in certain areas that have always remained as such. It is the massive increase in the energy drawn from sun that has caused a tremendous increase in the earth’s temperature. According to an estimate, there has been a 30 per cent increase in the energy output on earth from sun since the start of the solar system (Gough). Part of the energy drawn from the sun is reflected and some is retained. Some portion of the energy that gets absorbed in earth radiates back and escapes into the space. It is the energy absorbed minus energy radiated that decides the temperature of earth. Composition of the earth’s atmosphere also plays a decisive role in the increase of temperature. 99 per cent of the gases that atmosphere contains like oxygen and nitrogen are transparent towards the energy drawn from sun. Other gases like CO2 and water vapors tend to reduce the process of radiation of the energy from earth to the space. Therefore, increase in the level of these gases obviously increases the temperature of earth and contributes to the global warming. Of the two gases, it is the CO2 that concerns scientists the most because the water vapors in atmosphere remain constant in amount as compared to the CO2. Now, if the CO2 level in the atmosphere is increasing, global warming is then indeed, a real issue! The biggest source of CO2 is the fossil fuels. In addition to that, decomposition of materials and burning of wood also causes a considerable increase in the content of CO2 in the atmosphere. The rapid industrialization that has occurred in the recent centuries has caused a manifold increase in the CO2 level in the atmosphere. The reason why the resulting increase in the earth’s temperature is an issue is that this directly affects the ecosystem prevailing on earth. If the CO2 level continues to increase at the present rate, earth will soon become inhabitable for almost all species including humans, and life on earth will extinguish. The following text examines what recent studies have said about the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. (Deem) has shown the rate of annual increase in the C