Sample Essay: The Threat of Global Warming and the Ways to Counter It

Topic

The threat of Global Warming and the ways to counter it (FPSC Competitive Examination 2018 — English Essay, Topic 8)

Recurring theme: climate and global warming has appeared in six papers — 2006, 2007, 2008, 2018, and, in adjacent form, 2023 (recycling) and 2025 (reforestation).

Note: this essay takes the global collective-action and climate-finance angle, deliberately distinct from the companion essay Global Warming and Its Implications for Pakistan, which argues the domestic-vulnerability case.

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Rough Work

Exam Rough Work (what you actually write in the hall: about 200 words)

• Keywords: threat / ways to counter it. Two deliverables: give each about half the words.
• Type: analytical-argumentative. Thesis: the obstacle is political, a collective-action failure in which the causers are not the sufferers; counter it with binding mitigation plus financed adaptation.
• Science: IPCC AR6, about 1.1 to 1.3C of warming; 2024 the first calendar year above 1.5C (sure); Paris 2015, voluntary NDCs, current policies about 2.5 to 3C (verify).
• Asymmetry: Pakistan under 1% of emissions (sure); 2022 floods, 33m affected, 1,700+ dead, $30bn+ (sure); Karachi heatwave June 2015, 1,200+ dead (sure).
• Why the world fails: free-rider problem; fossil subsidies (IMF: verify); the $100bn pledge met only in 2022 (OECD: verify); loss and damage fund at COP27 (sure).
• Counter: grow first; transition is regressive. Rebuttal: Stern Review 2006 (sure); solar costs down about 89% since 2010 (verify); who pays is not the same as whether to act.
• Ways: carbon price and methane; adaptation: Bhola 1970 against recent cyclones (sure); grants not loans; debt-for-climate swaps; Brazil's deforestation cut, 2023 (verify); Pakistan's NDC of 50% by 2030, 35% conditional (sure); circular debt.
• Discourse: narration in Bhola and the 2022 floods; description of the flooded plain; argumentation in IV.
• Hook: 2024, the first year past 1.5C. Closing idea: the state that adapts while arguing loses fewer citizens.

Full thinking (study version)

Steps 1–2 of the playbook — roughly 25 minutes on the rough sheet.

The box

Topic:    The threat of Global Warming and the ways to counter it
Keywords: threat / ways to counter it  — TWO deliverables, both compulsory
Type:     Analytical-argumentative
Scope:    Global, with Pakistan as the vulnerable-state case. NOT the chemistry
          of the greenhouse effect. NOT the denial debate.
Thesis:   Settled science, available technology — a political obstacle.

Topic → Prompt (the decode)

The title is a contract with two clauses and the second one is where scripts fail. Most candidates spend 2,200 words on the threat and 300 on the remedies, then wonder why a well-written essay scored 48. If the examiner names two deliverables, the marks are split between them. Budget the word count before writing: roughly half and half.

Hidden debate: is global warming a technical problem awaiting invention, or a political problem of collective action and distributive justice? The evidence settles it — the science has been certain for years and solar is now the cheapest electricity ever built — so the binding constraint is that those who caused the warming are not those who suffer it.

Trap: the school essay — causes, effects, solutions, plant more trees. Also: this section already has a Pakistan-implications essay, so this one must hold the global and finance ground or it duplicates.

Brain dump (3 minutes, unfiltered)

The science

• IPCC AR6 — warming of roughly 1.1–1.3°C above pre-industrial
• 2024: the first calendar year past 1.5°C
• Paris 2015 — NDCs are voluntary and self-set; current policies point to roughly 2.5–3°C
• Sea level ~20cm since 1900, and the rate has doubled
• Attribution science can now assess individual events — the last refuge of "no single disaster can be blamed" is gone

The asymmetry (the heart of the essay)

• Pakistan emits under 1% of global greenhouse gases and ranks consistently among the ten most vulnerable states
• 2022 floods: a third of the country inundated, 33m affected, 1,700+ dead, more than 30 billion dollars in damages and losses
• 7,000+ glaciers, the largest concentration outside the poles — outburst flooding now, diminished flow later
• Karachi heatwave, June 2015 — 1,200+ dead within days
• Second-order: dengue surge after the floods; wheat and rice yields fall past a heat threshold; displacement into cities that cannot absorb it

Why the world has failed

• Free-rider problem — climate stability is a global public good, so every state urges abatement and postpones its own
• Fossil subsidies in the trillions once implicit costs are counted (IMF) — in effect a negative carbon price
• A coal plant commissioned today is a four-decade emissions commitment
• One hundred billion dollars a year promised in 2009, met only in 2022, and largely as loans
• COP27 agreed the loss and damage fund with Pakistan chairing the G77; COP28 operationalised it — hundreds of millions against hundreds of billions of need; the COP29 goal was called inadequate on the day it was adopted

The rebuttal arsenal

• Stern, 2006 — roughly 1% of output to act, against 5–20% not to
• Solar costs down ~89% since 2010 — the "let us grow first" objection rests on prices that no longer exist
• Pakistan's own unsubsidised rooftop solar surge in 2024 — households responding to tariffs, with no state programme behind it
• The objection confuses who should pay with whether to act

Ways to counter it

• Mitigation — carbon pricing; redirect subsidies into targeted income support; methane, ~30% of current warming and gone within a decade, is the fastest lever
• Adaptation — Bhola 1970 killed hundreds of thousands; recent Bangladeshi cyclones kill dozens. Shelters, village-level warning, trained volunteers — achieved while very poor
• Ahmedabad's heat action plan as the model for Pakistani cities
• Finance — loss and damage as grants not loans; debt-for-climate swaps; multilateral banks currently price the victim as the risk
• Land use — Brazil halved Amazon deforestation within a year of a policy change, 2023
• Pakistan — NDC of 50% by 2030 (35% conditional); circular debt blocks power reform; EU CBAM definitive from 2026 is a commercial warning

Stance (one sentence)

The obstacle is not knowledge or technology but a collective-action failure in which the causers are not the sufferers; countering it requires binding mitigation by emitters and financed adaptation for the vulnerable, held together.

Clusters

Sequence

Threat → why the response has failed → counter and rebuttal → the remedies → a conclusion that refuses both alarm and comfort, ending on the line that the state which adapts while arguing loses fewer citizens than the state which only argues.

Why cluster B exists at all. Putting why the world has failed between the threat and the remedies is what converts a school essay into an analytical one. Without it, the solutions look obvious and the reader wonders why nobody has done them. With it, every remedy is answering a diagnosed obstacle.

Cut — and why

• How the greenhouse effect works. School-level exposition. The examiner knows.
• The denial debate. Settled, and engaging it makes the script feel a decade old.
• Species extinction and biodiversity. True, moving, and it crowds out the political argument that is actually carrying the essay.
• A full narrative of the 2022 floods. One tight paragraph of figures beats a page of description — and the companion Pakistan essay owns that ground.

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Outline

• I. Introduction
  • Thesis: Global warming is no longer contested as science and is not, in the main, obstructed by technology; the obstacle is political. Because those who caused the warming are largely not those who suffer it, the problem is a collective-action failure dressed as a technical one. Countering it therefore requires two tracks held together — binding mitigation by the historic emitters, and financed adaptation for the vulnerable — and voluntary pledges have already demonstrated that neither track advances without enforcement.
• II. The Threat: Settled Science, Unequal Incidence
  • A. The physical record and the scientific consensus
    1. Warming to date and the 2024 threshold year
    2. Why a small shift in the mean multiplies extreme events
  • B. The observable consequences: heat, water and the cryosphere
    1. Sea level rise and deltaic exposure
    2. Glacial loss and the Indus, including outburst flooding
  • C. The asymmetry between those who emit and those who suffer
    1. Pakistan's share of global emissions
    2. The 2022 floods and their fiscal consequence
  • D. Second-order threats: food security, displacement and health
• III. Why the World Has Failed to Counter It
  • A. The free-rider problem and the failure of voluntarism
  • B. Fossil-fuel lock-in, subsidies and incumbent interests
  • C. The gap between climate finance pledged and climate finance delivered
    1. The hundred-billion pledge and its delayed, loan-heavy delivery
    2. The loss and damage fund against the scale of measured need
• IV. The Counter-Argument and Its Rebuttal
  • A. Counter-argument: developing economies must be permitted to grow first, and transition costs fall on the poor
  • B. Rebuttal: the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of transition, and the objection confuses who should pay with whether to act
    1. The Stern arithmetic and the 2022 floods as a national demonstration
    2. Falling technology costs and the possibility of leapfrogging
• V. The Ways to Counter It
  • A. Mitigation: energy transition, carbon pricing and methane
  • B. Adaptation: the priority track for vulnerable states
    1. Bangladesh's cyclone shelters and warning system
    2. Flood-plain enforcement, glacial warning and heat action plans
  • C. Finance: loss and damage, and debt relief tied to resilience
  • D. Land use and nature-based measures
  • E. What Pakistan must do within its own jurisdiction
  • F. Strengthen district-level heat and flood preparedness
    1. Circular debt, tariffs and building codes
    2. Climate risk in public project appraisal
• VI. Conclusion

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Essay

In 2024, average global temperature exceeded the pre-industrial baseline by more than one and a half degrees Celsius over a calendar year for the first time, and emissions continued to rise. The distinguishing feature of global warming as a public problem is that argument and action have moved in opposite directions. The science has narrowed towards certainty while the politics has widened towards evasion, and the result is a threat that is universally acknowledged and inadequately addressed. Successive assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have established that the warming observed since the industrial revolution is unequivocally the consequence of human activity. The instrumental record has kept pace with the models: the years since 2015 constitute the warmest sequence in the observational record. Nevertheless, emissions have continued to rise. This divergence is the analytical key to the topic. Global warming is not principally obstructed by ignorance, and it is no longer principally obstructed by technology, since the cost of solar generation has fallen by roughly nine-tenths in little more than a decade. The obstacle is political, and it takes a specific form: those who caused the warming are largely not those who suffer it. Countering the threat therefore requires two tracks held together: binding mitigation by the historic emitters and financed adaptation for the vulnerable. Thirty years of voluntary pledging have already demonstrated that neither track advances without enforcement.

The threat itself must first be stated precisely, because imprecision invites dismissal. Warming of approximately one point one to one point three degrees above the pre-industrial average sounds trivially small and is not, because the figure is a global annual mean that conceals enormous local and seasonal variation. The same arithmetic that produces a modest average produces disproportionate increases in the frequency of extremes, since a small shift in the centre of a distribution multiplies the occurrence of events at its tail. Consequently, heatwaves that would formerly have occurred once in fifty years now occur several times in the same period, and rainfall events of a given intensity have become measurably more probable. The science on attribution has advanced sufficiently that individual events can now be assessed for the degree to which warming made them more likely, which removes the last refuge of the argument that no particular disaster can be blamed on climate change.

The observable consequences are already distributed across every physical system. Sea level has risen by roughly twenty centimetres since 1900 and the rate of rise has approximately doubled in recent decades, which threatens deltaic populations from the Nile to the Indus. Glacial loss is proceeding across every major mountain system, and the implications for South Asia are unusually direct, since Pakistan contains more than seven thousand glaciers, the largest concentration outside the polar regions, and the Indus derives a substantial share of its flow from their melt. Accelerated melting produces a cruel sequence: greater flow and glacial lake outburst floods in the near term, followed by diminished flow when the reservoir of ice is gone. Moreover, extreme heat is approaching the limits of human physiological tolerance in parts of the subcontinent, as the Karachi heatwave of June 2015, which killed well over a thousand people in a matter of days, demonstrated with grim clarity.

The defining injustice of the problem, however, lies in the asymmetry between causation and consequence, and Pakistan constitutes the paradigmatic case. The country contributes under one per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and ranks consistently among the ten states most vulnerable to climate impacts. In the summer of 2022 monsoon rainfall several times the seasonal average combined with accelerated glacial melt to inundate roughly one-third of the country. More than thirty million people were affected, over seventeen hundred died, and the post-disaster needs assessment placed damages and economic losses at more than thirty billion dollars, with reconstruction requirements above sixteen billion. A country responsible for a rounding error in the global carbon budget absorbed a shock equivalent to a substantial fraction of its annual output. Furthermore, the fiscal consequence was immediate: a state already negotiating with creditors was obliged to borrow for reconstruction, which converted a climatic event into a debt event.

Beyond the direct physical damage lie second-order threats that will prove harder to manage than the floods themselves. Agricultural yields for wheat and rice decline measurably above certain temperature thresholds, and South Asia grows both staples close to those thresholds already. Water stress, food price volatility and the destruction of rural livelihoods are the classic antecedents of internal displacement, and displaced rural populations arrive in cities that lack the housing, employment and services to absorb them. Health systems face expanding ranges for vector-borne disease, and the surge in dengue across Pakistani cities following the 2022 floods illustrated how a hydrological event becomes an epidemiological one. Climate change, in short, does not present as a discrete environmental problem; it presents as a multiplier applied to every existing weakness in a state.

If the threat is this clear, the failure to counter it demands explanation, and the first explanation is structural. Climate stability is a global public good, which means that the benefits of any state's abatement accrue to all states while the costs accrue to the abater alone. Every government therefore has a rational incentive to urge reductions and to postpone its own, which is the textbook free-rider problem operating at planetary scale. The Paris Agreement of 2015 responded to the collapse of the binding Kyoto model by substituting nationally determined contributions, which are self-set and legally unenforceable. The diplomatic achievement was genuine, since near-universal participation was secured. The substantive result is that aggregate pledges remain insufficient, and analyses of current policies place likely warming by 2100 in the region of two and a half to three degrees. A system that asks each participant to set its own homework will receive the homework each participant prefers to do.

The second explanation is that incumbency is expensively defended. Global fossil-fuel subsidies remain vast, estimated by the International Monetary Fund at several trillion dollars annually when implicit environmental costs are included, and such subsidies function as a negative carbon price that directly offsets abatement policy. Energy infrastructure is additionally characterised by long asset lives: a coal plant commissioned today is an emissions commitment for four decades, which is why new coal capacity in Asia matters disproportionately to the global budget. Moreover, producer states with large proven reserves face the prospect that a successful transition strands the principal asset on their national balance sheet, and they negotiate accordingly. The persistence of these interests explains why the phrase agreed at the Dubai conference in 2023, transitioning away from fossil fuels, was treated as a diplomatic breakthrough despite committing no party to a dated obligation.

The third explanation concerns money, and it is the point on which the developing world's confidence has been most thoroughly eroded. Wealthy states pledged in 2009 to mobilise one hundred billion dollars annually for developing-country climate action by 2020. The target was reached, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, only in 2022, and a large share of the total took the form of loans rather than grants. The Loss and Damage Fund agreed at the Sharm el-Sheikh conference in 2022, with Pakistan chairing the developing-country negotiating bloc in the immediate aftermath of its floods, was a genuine normative advance. Yet initial pledges to it amounted to a sum measured in hundreds of millions against needs measured in hundreds of billions. The new collective finance goal adopted at Baku in 2024 was immediately described as inadequate by the states it was designed to assist. Consequently, vulnerable countries approach each negotiation with the reasonable expectation that commitments will be announced and not delivered.

A serious counter-argument arises at precisely this point and deserves to be stated at its strongest. It holds that the developing world cannot be asked to constrain its emissions when the atmospheric space was consumed by others. That roughly six hundred million people in Africa and tens of millions in South Asia still lack reliable electricity. And that demanding a renewable-only path from states at early industrialisation imposes a cost on the poor that the rich never bore. Proponents add that transition policies are domestically regressive, since carbon taxes and the removal of fuel subsidies fall hardest on low-income households. They cite the political backlash such measures have provoked in wealthy democracies as evidence that the agenda is unsustainable even where it is affordable.

The rebuttal concedes the justice of the premise while rejecting the conclusion, and it rests on three grounds. First, the economics of inaction are worse. Assessments beginning with the Stern Review in 2006 have consistently found the cost of stabilising the climate to be a small single-digit percentage of global output against damages an order of magnitude larger, and Pakistan's 2022 floods supplied a national demonstration of that arithmetic. Second, the technological premise has changed, and the objection now rests on outdated prices. Solar generation has become the cheapest source of new electricity across most of the world, which means that low-income states can leapfrog directly to distributed renewable capacity rather than repeating the coal-fired sequence, exactly as much of Africa leapfrogged fixed-line telephony. The surge in solar panel imports into Pakistan during 2024, driven by households and businesses responding to tariff increases rather than by any state programme, indicates how rapidly the economics can shift behaviour. Third, and most importantly, the objection confuses two distinct questions: who should pay, and whether action should occur. That the historic emitters owe the transition's cost is a strong claim; that the vulnerable should therefore decline to adapt while waiting for payment is not a strategy but a wager on other people's conscience.

The emissions problem requires enforceable commitments rather than aspirational promises. The practical instruments are known: a meaningful price on carbon, whether through taxation or emissions trading, so that the atmospheric cost enters commercial decisions. The redirection of fossil-fuel subsidies towards targeted income support, which protects poor households at a fraction of the fiscal cost of subsidising consumption. And concentrated action on methane, which accounts for a substantial share of current warming and dissipates within roughly a decade, making it the fastest available lever on near-term temperature. The European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism, whatever its merits as trade policy, demonstrates the direction of travel and should be read by exporting economies such as Pakistan as a commercial warning as well as an environmental one.

For states in Pakistan's position, however, adaptation is the track that saves lives soonest, and the decisive evidence comes from Bangladesh. The Bhola cyclone of 1970 killed people in the hundreds of thousands; fifty years later, cyclones of comparable intensity produce death tolls in the dozens. The difference was not a change in the weather but the construction of thousands of raised concrete shelters, an early-warning system extending to village level, and a volunteer corps trained to evacuate coastal populations. That transformation was achieved by one of the poorest countries in the world, which disposes of the argument that adaptation must await prosperity. Pakistan's equivalents are identifiable: flood-plain zoning that is enforced against encroachment, restoration of natural drainage, glacial lake outburst early-warning coverage, heat action plans in the pattern Ahmedabad pioneered in India after 2010, and drought-tolerant seed varieties for rain-fed agriculture.

Finance is the hinge on which both tracks turn, and it requires instruments rather than appeals. The Loss and Damage Fund must be capitalised on a scale proportionate to observed damage and disbursed as grants, since financing the reconstruction of a climate-vulnerable state through loans transfers the cost of others' emissions onto the victim's balance sheet and reduces its capacity to adapt to the next event. Debt-for-climate swaps, under which creditors write down obligations in exchange for verified expenditure on resilience, offer a practical route for countries carrying heavy external debt, and Pakistan is an obvious candidate. Furthermore, multilateral development banks require reform of their risk models, since the capital that must flow to adaptation in vulnerable economies is currently priced as though those economies were the risk rather than the casualty.

Land use completes the mitigation portfolio and is frequently the cheapest option available. Forests, mangroves, peatlands and soils constitute the largest accessible carbon sink, and their protection delivers adaptation benefits simultaneously, since mangroves buffer storm surge and forested catchments moderate flood peaks. Brazil demonstrated that the trend is reversible, cutting Amazon deforestation by roughly half within a single year of a change in enforcement policy after 2023, which shows that the binding constraint was political will rather than ecological difficulty. Pakistan's own afforestation programmes have delivered contested results, and the lesson is that planting is the easy half of the task while survival monitoring, community tenure and grazing management constitute the half that determines whether a plantation becomes a forest.

Within its own jurisdiction Pakistan must finally align its declared ambition with its administrative reality. The country's nationally determined contribution commits it to a substantial emissions reduction by 2030, the larger part conditional on international support, alongside targets for renewable generation and electric vehicle adoption. Meeting even the unconditional portion requires four steps. The federal government must resolve the circular debt that paralyses the power sector, reform tariff structures that presently penalise grid-connected solar, and enforce building codes for thermal efficiency in a country where cooling demand is rising fastest. The Planning Commission must also build climate risk into project appraisal, so that public infrastructure is not rebuilt in the path of the next flood. Moreover, provincial disaster authorities require the funding and legal authority to prevent construction in flood plains, since the single largest determinant of the 2022 death toll was where people were living.

Local disaster preparedness is the link between international climate commitments and lives saved. The 2015 Karachi heatwave showed that rising temperatures become especially dangerous where outdoor workers lack shade, healthcare is difficult to reach and households face power failures. Provincial health departments should coordinate heat alerts with the Pakistan Meteorological Department and require major hospitals to prepare for periods of exceptional demand. District administrations need flood-risk maps, rehearsed evacuation routes and maintenance plans for drainage channels. The same information should reach schools, employers and neighbourhood organisations through simple public warnings. Bangladesh's experience with cyclone shelters demonstrates the value of sustained local preparation rather than occasional emergency relief. None of these measures can halt global warming. They can, however, reduce deaths and disruption while the international negotiations on emissions and finance continue.

The conclusion that the evidence supports is therefore neither alarmist nor reassuring. Global warming is a threat of a category the international system was not designed to handle: its causes are diffuse, its costs are deferred, its victims are politically weak, and its remedies require present sacrifice for future and largely foreign benefit. That combination explains the gap between what is known and what is done, and it will not be closed by further demonstrations of the science, which have been abundant and insufficient. What can close it is the conversion of moral claims into enforceable obligations: a price on carbon that incumbents cannot evade, finance that arrives as grants rather than as debt, and adaptation treated as infrastructure rather than as charity. For Pakistan the lesson carries a particular sharpness. The country will continue to bear damages it did not cause, and it is entitled to say so at every negotiation; but entitlement is not a flood defence. The state that adapts while arguing will lose fewer citizens than the state that only argues, and the 2022 floods have already established, at a cost of thirty billion dollars, what that difference is worth.

Check before use

• Confirm the source and meaning of the 2024 calendar-year temperature threshold.
• Recheck climate-finance disbursements, emission shares and current international agreements.