As an Energy major, I spend a good amount of time studying the history of the earth’s environment and the impact that human activity has had on it. This quarter alone, I am in not only an Environmental Science class, but also a philosophy class on Environmental Ethics. That is over seven hours a week, not including studying, that I spend devoted to learning about this subject, and that is entirely because of how passionate I feel about it. It is why, for that reason, I become generally confused when, in every single environmental class I take, the professor is forced to address the “skeptics”, those number of people who “don’t believe” that some of the habits we have as humans are taking a toll on the earth’s atmosphere. These skeptics are the reason the subject of worldwide climate change has continued to be a “debate”, a ridiculous debate that is only postponing actions that the entire world should and needs to take in order to slow down the earth’s warming before this world becomes unlivable for all of us.
To be fair, I can see where some of these skeptics would become confused. For example, a lot of people believe that the earth has probably, over its incredibly long existence, gone through climactic changes similar to what we are experiencing now and that it’s a natural process, not something that we have created.
Yes, I believe the earth’s climate goes through certain waves that are hotter, or colder than the climate previous. But the point is not this is that we are, as a fact, contributing to the warming of the earth at this moment. Yes, it is possible that this warming is in part due to natural processes, but no, the earth’s warming is by no means only due to these natural processes. The truth is that we are putting way too much carbon, and methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere: the earth cannot handle it. This is the point: global warming, or whatever you feel most comfortable calling it, is happening, and it is not a good thing. At all.
I don’t mean to go all Al Gore on you, but in order to satisfy the earth’s current consumption rates we would need one and a half earths. We do not have one and a half earths…. We have one, actually. Along with that, the sea levels are rising and are only continuing to rise at an annual rate and, indeed… it has been happening long enough that we actually have to have an annual rate for sea level rise. In addition to that, the rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere are causing ocean acidification, our glaciers are also disappearing, and we are losing forest after forest and coastline after coastline. Like honestly, skeptics, if you were a scientist, you would be in the minority: only 4 percent of credited scientists say that these statistics do not prove that the earth is warming, and is continuing to warm.
But that, again, is not the point that I am trying to make. I do not, in reality, care a single bit if a person 100 percent agrees or not that that this horrible phenomenon that is occurring on our earth is, in fact, global warming. What I care about, though, is that these skeptics do not want to do anything about the fact that the earth is changing and approaching a point of no return. There are so, so many devastating consequences that we will have to face when the earth reaches this point. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to do something about it, or at least be concerned about it?
I mean, how many pictures of flooded towns do we have to see before we are concerned? How many pictures of polar bears floating on a thin piece of ice do we have to see before we are concerned? How many disappointing ski seasons do we have to have before we realize that whatever is happening with our climate right now is not right?
Our children, our grandchildren, and even our great grandchildren are not going to live in as healthy of an environment as we are able to live in. It has gotten to the point that I feel lucky to have grown up at this point in time because, in reality, the future does not look nearly as bright and as beautiful as the present does. The future is going to have a lack of trees, of seaside towns, of species that could not handle what this rise in temperature is doing to their habitats. If that isn’t concerning, which it should be, perhaps it will be concerning that in the future the air is not going to be as fresh, the water isn’t going to be as blue, or swimmable, or even drinkable.
I know it’s hard: it’s not easy to make environmentally conscious choices. It is easy to just forget about it, get lazy about it. I mean, I use way too much hairspray to even try and tell you that you need to change the way you live your life. But what still frustrates me is this gridlock: this national awareness of the changes in the climate, yet the inability to do anything about it. We have Obama proposing environmental policy after environmental policy, yet still a lot of environmentally benign policy coming out of the government. Or we have so many environmental awareness campaigns, yet still people throwing their cigarette butts on the ground when there’s literally a trash can a five-second walk away.
We need to think about it, and I mean really think about it, because the bottom line is this: by killing the earth, we are killing not only the trees that make the spring times greener and the fall times more colorful, but we are also killing ourselves. We are killing the place we live in and, if we take it too far, this place will become unlivable. We need to remember that if we give to the earth, then the earth will give back to us. It will give us the air we need to breath, the water we need to drink, and the food we need to eat. And I mean, who really wants to take the chance of living in a world without snow days and polar bears?
