Why and How it’s Changing
There are so many places and people in this world today that the climate was bound to change. The way we live demands it to. But what we’re doing isn’t good for the planet, or future generations. The thing to remember is these changes act like dominoes. Like I said at the beginning, when you change one thing, another thing is affected, and this is exactly what humanity is doing. Let’s look at how it starts.
RISING EMISSIONS – The way the world works and moves is different now, than anything before. In the future it will be different from now. That’s what happens, it evolves. But to live the lifestyle we live at the minute comes at a cost. The kick-starter of the global temperature rise are the rising emissions thrown into the atmosphere.
Industry is now at an all-time high. Countries around the world are producing energy for their populations, providing them with buildings, roads, materials, In the world today, there isn’t a single country that uses mainly renewable energy sources. In fact, the countries that come closest is currently Iceland (with their geothermal environment) and Norway with their hydro power. To produce electricity, which can then help in the production of roads and buildings, we burn substances which releases too much carbon dioxide into the air, also known as CO2. But with a higher global population means a higher demand for food, and with Trans National Co-operations like McDonald’s and KFC, worldwide businesses, this food has to be accessible for all. This means that more space has to be given to livestock, at the expense of copious amounts of rainforest, which act as a carbon sink, absorbing around 123 billion tonnes of carbon in the Amazon alone. But you get rid of this, and what this leads to is higher levels of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere as cows and sheep produce this as a waste product. The fertiliser that these farmers, and many farmers around the world use contains nitrogen, that when used, emits nitrous oxide, another harmful product being pumped into the atmosphere.
With the advancement of technology over the years, this has allowed global and local travel to be far more accessible, and far more frequent. In the UK there are over 32,000,000 cars on the road and over 1 billion in the world, but only 7 million electric cars in the world. This means that less than only around 0.7% of all cars aren’t pumping harmful ‘ greenhouse’ gases into our atmosphere.
GREENHOUSE GASES – Of course, gases like carbon dioxide occur naturally, for example we breath it out as a waste product. It’s perfectly natural. The worrying sign, is that human activity is increasing the concentrations of these gases into our atmosphere. The reason why they’re known as the greenhouse gases is because they act like the glass of a greenhouse you might find in your garden. The glass of a greenhouse traps the sunlight, allowing the crops and seeds to benefit as they need sunlight to grow. This is positive. However, these gases absorb the sunlight and don’t let it back out of the planet, essentially warming the planet’s global temperature. Greenhouse gases are by far the biggest contributor to global temperature rise. To put it into perspective the concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere has risen by 48% since the start of the industrial revolution back in 1750. This means that we’ve almost doubled it in just under 300 years, and before it, the level had only slightly deviated in 4.5 billion years. The other gases like methane and nitrous oxide are actually more serious than CO2, however, thankfully, they do not have the same atmospheric lifetime. These gases accumulate over lifetimes, and what’s most worrying is that the natural causes in these increases are estimated to have provided around 0.1% of all gases in the past 100 years. So when you take that all in, it’s no surprise that the global temperature has gradually increased 0.2 degrees per decade since the industrial revolution. This, in its essence, is global warming.
This is how the Earth is warming. We’re doing it. It will rise and fall naturally, it always has. But when you take into consideration the demand that we place on all aspects of life to maintain our current lifestyle, then that is going to drastically change.