The Sobering Reality of Climate Change: Global Warming Rears its Ugly Head
The words ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ have been tossed around since the early 1990s, but with each passing year, the word’s connotations grow darker and more menacing than ever. Many people do not understand the meaning of climate change. When we hear the word, we think of exaggeration, we think of “hippies,” we even think of the climate change deniers. However, the ideas around the words of climate change and global warming do not hold a candle to the severe impact these interchangeable words hold.
The definition of climate change “is a long-term change in the average weather patterns that have come to define Earth’s local, regional, and global climates. These changes have a broad range of observed effects that are synonymous with the term.” For example, a real-life scenario of climate change in action is the Canadian winter. Gone are the days of snow heaps rising to the height of electric wires or tobogganing down the roof of a shed. Some years Canadians don’t even have snow on Christmas. This is because the global temperature has risen a whopping one-degree celsius since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) defines global temperature on their website as, “the global temperature record represents an average over the entire surface of the planet.” To give context to ‘one degree,’ NASA says, “In the past, a one- to two-degree drop was all it took to plunge the Earth into the Little Ice Age. A five-degree drop was enough to bury a large part of North America under a towering mass of ice 20,000 years ago.”
While the effects of global warming can be seen worldwide, the most imminent concern for experts is the impact on our oceans. A massive contributor to the rising global temperature is greenhouse gas emissions. These emissions are absorbed by the oceans and cause the temperature of the oceans to rise. When ocean temperatures rise it can cause coral bleaching and loss of breeding ground for marine wildlife. According to the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature), the oceans’ rising temperatures can also have damaging effects on the benefits that humans derive from the oceans: it can “threaten food security, increase the prevalence of diseases and cause more extreme weather events and the loss of coastal protection.” This will increase natural disasters and cause a decline in fishery catches for those whose lives depend on the fishing industry.
A phrase we hear all the time, “the polar ice caps are melting,” sounds like a line from a movie, but it is much more significant than that. With the global temperature rise, the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate. The worst case scenario if we do not do anything to stop global warming was highlighted in 2013 by National Geographic, “sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.”
Essentially, if we continue to let global warming take over, the oceans’ fate would be a dark one and cause the destruction of life as we know it.
Unfortunately, most of the effects humans have caused are irreversible. Even if everyone in the world stopped emitting greenhouse gasses today, global warming would continue to go on for the next few centuries. NASA states this is because it “takes a while for the planet and the oceans to respond and because carbon dioxide — the predominant heat-trapping gas — lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. There is a time lag between what we do and when we feel it.” However, this is not to say that we shouldn’t try. NASA says, “in the absence of major action to reduce emissions, global temperature is on track to rise by an average of 6 °C.” NASA goes on to say that while global warming is never going to go away, it is not too late to limit the worst of the effects climate change will have.
The critical element that society has to accept is to learn how to live and adapt to climate change. Global warming is not something we can bend to our will. We have to change with it and adjust to the new world we live in. Examples of necessary change are things like driving electric cars and recycling; however, to fully adapt, society needs to come together and form a coordinated response. We cannot do this without the commitment and support from governments all around the world. So I urge you to speak out for climate change and demand a higher standard from your governments.
To learn more about actions you can take to prevent further climate change, please visit https://climate.nasa.gov. Together, we can make a difference.
