We entered the 2010s with Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” playing on our car radios and school dances. Little did we know that Nelly was predicting the future. This past July holds the record as the hottest month in the span of 136 years of monitoring. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded that the global average temperature for July 2019 was 1.71°F above the average 20th century temperature of 60.4°F. This position was formerly held by August 2016, with 1.66°F increase from the average. Comparing the temperature map of January 2010 to January 2019 anyone can see that the world is getting warmer.
But how much damage can just two measly degrees actually do? Between 2010 and 2018 about 2,200 gigatons of the Greenland ice sheet has melted. And the ice sheet hasn’t gained any mass since 1998.
What else? We’re seeing bigger and more frequent fires. Australia, currently is seeing its worst bushfires, and they’ve been going on for a month. Bushfires are to Australia what the California fires are to us. Both of our countries are experiencing fires of new high scales earlier and longer than the average season. On December 10, Sydney was covered in bushfire smoke and officials said that the air quality was 11 timers higher than what’s considered “hazardous”. Air quality this bad is lethal. The reason for these much more vicious fires is that the Earth is getting hotter, and this dryer climate proliferates fires.
This decade has seen the environment get exponentially worse.There’s a crisis going on and as we move into the next decade we need to take initiative. Warmer temperatures lead to more fires, which then leads to warmer temperatures, which leads to more glacial melting and sea levels rising. We can’t be quiet about this, until we do something we will be stuck in this feedback loop. As we move into the next decade we have to do as our seer Nelly foretold, “Stop pacin, time wastin”.