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Like many hot topics (in the United States, at least), climate change is a controversial and heavily debated issue. Even some of the people closest to me think there is no truth behind global warming or they believe that the climate changes that are being experienced globally are naturally occurring. These same people live on a mountain, vacation by the ocean, enjoy foraging through the woods, share my love of sea turtles, have experienced fear of devastating wild fires, and are frequently in flood watches due to hurricane rains. My point here is: they love the tranquility, vastness, and extraordinary essence of nature itself, but don’t seem to want to believe that we all are contributing to the destruction of some of the environments we enjoy the most. So, how is climate change really affecting the world we live in?
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Where Climate Change Came From
Don’t get me wrong. I start thinking about climate change and my thoughts begin to run in never-ending circles. Of course there are natural instances of climate changes such as el Nino, volcanic eruptions, or changes in the radiation from the sun. These naturally occurring events can and do change the Earth’s temperature, but not at the sheer intensity and speed that the Earth is currently tracking.
Add in the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s, the beginning of modern-society and life as we currently know it. The boom of industrialization helped create the lives that we live and know today. From the advancement of urban areas and cities such as New York and Boston, the influx of immigrants from all over the globe, rise of unskilled laborers and establishment of minimum wage, and more affordable consumer products—none of which are necessarily bad things. In fact they helped CREATE much of the United States that we are proud of, especially the American Dream and the rise of the middle class. With the rise of the middle class, the income gaps between the low, middle, and upper class rose as well—making it harder for a family to traverse from lower to middle class.
However, the advancements of the industrial revolution relied heavily upon the use fossil fuels—from transportation, to factories, to electricity and heating individual homes and businesses. Fossil fuels were considered a cheap way to produce a lot of products. The more affordable consumer products led to the rise in both consumerism and capitalism.
Although fossil fuels have been attributed to the advancements in transportation, communication, and consumerism, they are also now considered the leading cause of manufactured climate change. Burning fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal cause the release of carbon dioxide into the air. As a naturally occurring greenhouse gas that is essential for human life to be sustained on Earth, why is release of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels a bad thing?
Why Greenhouse Gases are Important
The Earth’s atmosphere is made up of greenhouse gases; their sole purpose is to trap heat on the planet and stop it from escaping into space, much like one of those large, thick blankets you curl up on your couch with. This causes what is known as the greenhouse effect, enabling us to live on Earth. According to one source, without the greenhouse effect/atmospheric blanket, Earth (as a whole) would be about 30 degrees colder and we would not be able to survive.
Greenhouse gases can be either natural or synthetic; the three main greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—all occur in nature; however, we’ve also been adding synthetic versions of each gas to the environment through the burning of fossil fuels, the filling of our landfills, and other means. Human manufactured greenhouse gases are released through:
- Burning Fossil Fuels
- Deforestation
- Trees and other plants can remove carbon dioxide from the air and convert it to energy for themselves. By removing the trees, we lose these carbon storage units and we release the stored carbon dioxide when the trees are burnt
- Agriculture
- Agricultural animals produce a vast amount of methane
- Use of nitrous oxide fertilizer
- Cement Production: accounting for about 2% of all carbon dioxide emissions
Both Carbon Dioxide and Nitrous Oxide are long-lived greenhouse gases, meaning the gases produced and released in the atmosphere today remain in the atmosphere for sometimes up to hundreds of years before being broken down or utilized in someway. Methane, a comparatively short-lived gas, still remains in the atmosphere for about a decade and is up to 30x more powerful than carbon dioxide.
What Does This Have to Do With Climate Change?
Since the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased by nearly 50%; from 280 parts per million (ppm) pre-industrial revolution to 451ppm in the last 150 years. Additionally, the concentration of the other major greenhouse gases have increased as well. This essentially is creating a thicker, heavier blanket in the atmosphere (remember the one we’re curling up with on the couch?), trapping more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, and keeping the Earth below warmer—otherwise known as global warming. According to recent reports, there is “unequivocal evidence that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land.”
As the atmosphere, oceans, and land temperatures rise, a number of potential climate change effects are possible. Anyone notice the devastating weather events that have happened in the first half of 2021? I’m not saying they are absolutely related to climate change, buut it sure is quite coincidental.
How does climate change affect us?
As average atmospheric temperatures rise, this could potentially mean:
- Ocean temperatures also rise, causing glaciers and ice sheets to melt. Water also expands as it gets warmer. All of this leading to rising sea levels.
- More evaporation occurs, subsequently causing more precipitation. Some areas will experience wetter weather, others drier.
- The drier dry areas will continue to experience extreme drought, making wildfires even more of a possibility.
- The changing weather patterns (wetter wet areas, drier dry areas, and higher temperatures) can worsen and increase the frequency of many “natural” disasters such as storms (hurricanes and tornados), floods, heat waves, and droughts.
- A warmer, wetter world, leads to increasing insect populations (I’m looking at your mosquitos). The increase in insects, will lead to more insect-borne illnesses such as Lyme’s Disease and West Nile virus
- The air we breathe becomes more imbued with smog, soot, and allergy pollutants (mold from the moist weather and pollen from the longer, stronger allergy seasons); this can cause an increase in respiratory illnesses such as asthma or exacerbate those like COPD.
- Crops suffer as they are lost to droughts, floods, and temperature extremes that they can’t survive.
Each of the possible scenarios above has costly and devastating effects, felt unequally across many different groups of society. From jeopardizing access to drinking water, extensive property damage, hazardous material spills, out of control wildfires, displacement of communities, and the loss of life, the possible outcomes of climate change will be felt by everyone, albeit disproportionately.
What Can We Do About Climate Change?
Realizing that each of us is only one small human in the entire global economy, it can feel daunting to understand climate change and think we can do something about it. But we can! Each small, individual change for the good starts to add up as more and more people get involved. Small changes we each can make with a big impact, could look something like:
- Switching to less single-use plastic (like water bottles, straws, sandwich/freezer bags). You can easily get started with these tips!
- Reduce water usage (shorter showers, turning water off when brushing our teeth, showering with a partner)
- Recycle and Compost what you can (Check out the simple ways to start composting)
- Walk, Bike, Carpool
- Be a Conscious Consumer; think about if we really need the product we are buying and understand that buying a product creates a demand for it to be created.
None of us, not even the most eco-conscious among us, can be perfect all time. Sometimes we want to fly to travel the world, need to drive, have to eat the food that is available, etc. We shouldn’t need to give up things that we have worked really hard for (traveling the world to experience different cultures, for me), but we can most certainly try to off-set them by living a more eco-conscious lifestyle and staying educated.