Daniela Arriaga 11/8/21
Climate change Impacts
We have come to the point where we let things be and forget about everything that doesn’t involve politics, money, or fame, but we have been living under dangerous conditions and it’s simply ignored. We have been living in a world that is killing us humans and other species little by little. I have noticed that there was the constant worry of the rise in CO2 ever since I was young. There were many news reports about this topic but all of a sudden it shut off, It shut off when we need it to be our number one priority. How come we stopped seeing “Go green” or “don’t use plastic”? I rarely see anything about the effects of a forest fire. The media will just inform you that there is a wildfire but it won’t inform you about how much CO2 emission it’s adding. We’re already drowning in plastic and not to mention our oceans, everyday sea animals are consuming mass amounts of plastic all because someone didn’t know where the trash was, our temperatures are rising and we can see the effects in the North pole where glaciers are melting at a fast rate causing the water level to rise causing floods in many places. Many animals have gone extinct and some flee from areas where people are clearing land for money. Politics are often seen fighting about money, people, and the government but scarcely ever about Global warming, pollution, and deforestation. We are living under dangerous circumstances and no one minds.
The ocean plastic problem has many people campaigning to help and wish to do something about it, but it’s not enough, they need more helping hands but the problem is that they can’t because of the fact that people don’t believe nor care to inform themselves. Ocean plastic is a massive issue, when we hear the term we just think of animals ingesting it but there is much more than that, in the article “Ocean plastic pollution: A convenient but distracting truth” by Standford Richard he states “Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, largely from the burning of fossil fuels, are causing oceans to warm and acidify.” The warming of our ocean is causing our coral reefs to bleach, bringing down the fish population, along with overfishing and oil spills. The acidification of oceans is heavily impacting organisms like oysters and sea snails because their shells begin to dissolve because of the low PH balance. “Climate change impacts are also associated with changing species and disease distributions, particularly from hotter lower latitude regions towards the poles, and such changes can also cause major ecological community change, and potentially also negatively affect biodiversity [15].” As we can see the problem is more than just plastic, no matter what solutions we find there is always another obstacle to overcome, though there are changes we can make and help we can get, In the article “The importance of marine debris network to prevent and reduce ocean plastic pollution” it explains the help we can get with Networks, around 6 debris networks were chosen to give an informative investigation on what they found being in an MDN and the aid they give. The marine debris network is a great way to get the word across by platforms that reach regional and national scale, not only are they reaching out by participating in advocating globally sharing their ideas and communicating they are following the steps of NAOO (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), the Honolulu strategy is a foundation that prevents litter and debris on shorelines and in many beaches. Methods like the ones this article stated are something that restores the faith in humanity but there are still many threats that are harming us.
We know we have definitely messed up badly when we have started to melt the world’s largest ice shelf, the online media called “Gale OneFile-News” posted a story by “Rebecca English” called “Worlds largest ice shelf melts 10 times faster than expected; study shows global warming impact” it stated that ever since 2019 sea levels have been rising in many places because of this melting cap. I think we fail to realize that this is a huge issue, the warming of our waters because of global warming is not our only problem, floods are severe in many areas and damages are being done, The rise of sea levels can cause destruction for other habitats and can cause damages to our freshwaters by seeping into our aquifers, we won’t be able to have drinking water if this continues. In the text, it says that a former scientist doctor from Cambridge University called Dr. Poul Christoffersen studied the ice shelf for four years, throughout those years he checked the melt rate the salinity and the ocean currents that passed through it and mentioned that with the fast melting of this large glacier and other small icebergs there is expected to see less sea ice and more crumbling ice chunks falling into the sea tripling the speed at which glaciers melt. These ice shelves are a huge part of the ecosystem and they keep everything balanced, they are used for protection against predators by penguins and seals. The media have shown the great impact the north has taken, from starving polar bears to little or no snow in parts where snow is supposed to last years. We rarely see these images in hardly any places and when we do we still choose to do nothing about it.
Apart from the North pole, North American forest is also taking a lot of damage, the prairie forest the border of Central America has seen a big downfall in the last couple of years, because of global warming and its massive CO2 emissions has caused the forest to grow warmer and warmer, in the article “Will environmental changes reinforce the impact of global warming on the prairie-forest border of North America?” it states “ Forests will experience runs of several unusually warm years, with temperatures equal to predicted mean temperatures a few decades in the future, thus hastening the rate of forest change” with changes like these more random forest fires can start and burn millions of acres before it can be controlled by local authorities, not to mention the vast amounts of Co2 it’s releasing, Trees give us the oxygen we need and having a forest helps us increase our oxygen levels but destroying them for money is causing our downfall. A talk with Nobel prize-winning Climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer was done on the Goldman Sachs youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbEMSXg5z-E in the time 1:54 he answered the question “Where we are in the current climate situation and why the UN IPCC really made the case for drastic climate action that is necessary for the next 12 years or so” and he answers that they have better technology and thanks to that we have gotten more information about climate change but he states “In terms of politics we are much further behind, where our knowledge is. Its been a lot of progress in some sense but it’s way shorter than where it needs to be”. 7:23 he mentions how people will react to rapid change “ Will they respond in an anticipatory fashion, move to protect themselves? or will they say we’ll worry about this later in which case disaster social fragmentation, conflict, these are all possibilities”. This video was released in 2019, it is currently 2021 and so far the answer to his question is that we said we’ll worry about it later and now suffer the consequences.
In all honesty, I don’t believe we will make it far if we keep on doing nothing, we know perfectly well that things are plummeting at a fast rate but all we can do is make small changes because we hold little power, those higher-ups can do so much about it but they block it off because they are scared to bring up something so controversial. I want to mention that although these are heavy impacts it’s never too late, there are solutions and there are small ways we can resolve this mess we made although it won’t be as fast. With mass amounts of plastic and overfishing as well as the warming of the ocean we rely so heavily on we don’t really know how long we have, the rising sea waters will soon be too much. The vast amounts of carbon in the atmosphere are causing a hole in the ozone layer, causing a chain reaction that links to man-made machines that cause climate change because of the greenhouse effect. We are not too late but we are not enough to do something about everything.
