I have a question: how would you like it if someone came into your house and slaughtered your family? I don't think you would like that, I know wouldn’t. Unfortunately, that’s happening already to millions of animals across the planet. Wanna know why? Humans and their selfish, rapacious need for consumption of fossil fuels. According to NASA, since 1880, the global temperature has risen a whole one-degree Celsius and we are approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius soon. Doesn't seem like much right? Well, that’s wrong! If our planet temperature rises to two degrees Celsius, then we will go through a global climate catastrophe. Now before I tell you what happens at climate catastrophe, let me explain what has happened already due to the current rise.
The sun is a powerful warming machine, emitting large beams of rays into our atmosphere, one of these rays being infrared. For those that don't know, infrared is felt by us as heat and Carbon Dioxide. Now, ice and water reflect these rays back into space but due to our ozone layer in our atmosphere, some of the Carbon Dioxide is kept inside. This is what's known as greenhouse gasses and allows for life on earth as we know. The natural amount of Carbon Dioxide would be perfectly fine, but thanks to rapacious humans, we have increased the amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere by 2,000 gigatons -- that’s two million million tons of CO2, with fossil fuels, cement production and land use. According to NASA, this has lead to Greenland’s ice-land almost doubling in loss of mass since 1996! Carbon Dioxide levels have been the highest they've ever been in the past 650,000 years and we know this because of tree rings and gas compositions trapped in ice. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, this melting has caused a rise in sea levels by a tenth of an inch every year and eight inches since 1901! Also, because water absorbs 90 percent of the Carbon Dioxide heat, the levels have also been rising due to expansion (water expands when heated up, hence boiling water appears higher in a pot)!
Another sign that points in the direction of climate change support is that we have had double as manyrecord highs within the last decade than record lows, also showing that the past three decades have been the hottest since we started recording in 1850! Now, this may not seem like a big issue to some people (the people that idiotically think this is a hoax), but let's get to where things can really get scary and most of all, deadly. That is called global climate catastrophe. If the temperature of this planet rises two degrees Celsius, then the sea levels will increase by six to nine meters. In the event you cannot comprehend exactly what that means, it means that islands will be completely engulfed, causing millions of people to become refugees to their own nation because they would be floating in what is now a bigger ocean. Drought and infectious diseases also increase due to this. Our forest will be destroyed due to invasive beetles and insects and worst of all, 30 percent to 50 percent of all species on the planet will go extinct. Let’s do the math, there are seven billion humans; if we multiply that by .3 to represent 30 percent, then we will be saying goodbye to about 2.1 billion people. That’s just human beings, minus the other species that definitely won't be able to survive.
This is just the beginning of what is going to happen if we don't try to do something now! Try to carpool with friends, don't leave your car running if it runs solely on fossil fuels and gasoline, try to use less hairspray (it emits CFCs that also helps destroy the ozone). You also don't have to listen to me because I’m just a millennial who likes to read and it’s a free country so I can go screw myself. I know, but if you plan on having kids or already have kids, think about their futures because if we continue the route we’re going, there won't be a future. Especially because we haven't found a possible Earth 2.0 yet, so we have no place to ship anybody.
