Why climate change is a problem
Negative effects of climate change range from wildfires (like California’s in 2020 and Australia’s in 2019), to stronger hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rising.
Small temperature shifts have major effects on the environment. To illustrate, a 2% change in temperature will either put NYC under ice or under water.
Roughly 40% of the human population lives on the coast. These cities (below) will be increasingly at risk of flooding in the coming decades.
Evidence climate change is accelerated by humans
Over 97% of climate scientists agree that “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”
Earth’s temperature changes due to a greenhouse effect and CO2 is a primary contributor to this.
You can determine historical CO2 levels by looking at ice cores. It’s also reinforced by evidence from tree rings, ocean sediments, coral reefs, and sedimentary rocks.
There currently is over 33% more CO2 in the atmosphere than any point in the last 800,000 years. (Homo sapiens arrived ~200,000 years ago)
Now zooming in on the last 150 years, after the industrial revolution, you can see that not only are CO2 levels higher than they’ve ever been, they’re still accelerating.
We’ve already increased the average global temperature by 1 degree over the last 100 years.
Similarly to how the Coronavirus spread started small, then rapidly accelerated to the point it could only be controlled through extreme measures, we’re at the point where we need extreme measures to control this greenhouse effect and CO2 levels.
