It’s scary to understand that our generation is going to bear the responsibility of preventing climate change, so we don’t have to be the generation to experience it more than we already have. What’s scarier is that our current president does not believe its effects are real. Therefore, it’s much easier for us to ignore the news or unfollow Trump on Twitter, but our world is overdue for some assistance.
We must become educated, and to attain this knowledge we cannot always rely on those around us. Instead, we must turn to scientific facts and teach ourselves. Taking such a large initiative is the reason why there aren’t enough people behind preventing climate change, including the government, but we don’t have that option anymore.
According to the article, “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change,” by Nathaniel Rich from the New York Times, the world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. One degree should be nothing right?
Rich explains, “If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming a ‘prescription for long-term disaster.’ Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.”
Now you’re thinking, why the heck isn’t this kind of stuff on the news? Why isn’t the president talking about this? There is more than a 95 percent chance that the strongest influence on climate change is from human activity. Becoming educated on climate change is not difficult, and becoming educated does not mean you must constantly be absorbed in this. However, our generation is facing troubles that others before us didn’t necessarily need to be concerned with at our age. In a sense, we are forced to grow up a little quicker nowadays on the subject of politics and our world, but we have all of the resources to make it easier.
If you Google search “climate change” there are new articles posted from official sources every single day. Simply take the time to read the most recent ones and understand them. There are many ways we can start improving our world and these life changes will become impactful when our generation finally believes that they are.
Source: Rich, Nathaniel. (2018). Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change. NYT Mag. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html