Climate Change: Will We Act?
The first time I heard about global warming was in grade school in Oregon. My teacher explained that gasses that were both natural and manmade were trapping heat inside the earth’s atmosphere, causing the planet’s temperatures to rise. She told us the polar ice sheets would melt, sea levels would rise, animals would go extinct, and weather patterns would change. She called it the greenhouse effect and told us if we burned less fossil fuels and took care of the environment, we could do something about it.
My seven-year-old mind was shaken to the core. Visions of cities under water, dead polar bears, and massive storms caused by man’s activities were incomprehensible to me. I could grasp the pollution of the past as acts of innocent ignorance, but how could we keep doing it after knowing the consequences? I ran home and told my dad everything I had learned. I expected alarm or disgust, but instead he smiled and said, “Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal. The planet is too big for us to cause all those problems.”
Nearly 30 years have passed and the ice has continued to melt, the sea has continued to rise, and temperatures have continued to increase. In fact, the pace of the warming has nearly tripled from when the alarm bells were first rung, but my dad’s argument still persists, and the output of greenhouse gasses continues to rise. It is true that people are more aware of global warming than they were 30 years ago. Politicians, businesses and individuals all talk as if they think it’s a big deal, but meanwhile the amount of greenhouse gasses we pour into the air continues to grow.
While it is true developing countries such as China and India play a major role in the increasing rates that greenhouse gasses are pumped into the atmosphere, the U.S. output has increased as well. Carbon Dioxide (CO2), which makes up the majority of the greenhouse gasses we emit, comes from the burning of fossil fuels. For individuals, the easiest ways to create less CO2 are to drive more efficient vehicles and to drive less. During my second-grade year, the average gas mileage for light-duty vehicles was 22.1 mpg. In 2005, it was 21.0 mpg. Of the four major forms of greenhouse gasses (CO2, Methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N2O), Fluorinated Gasses), the only one that has not seen continuously increasing emissions is Nitrous Oxide. Its emissions haven’t changed. Again, these are not global statistics, they are solely U.S. statistics.
Thirty years ago we talked about the greenhouse effect and global warming, and we still do. Now we’ve added another term: climate change. While global warming and climate change have similar definitions and are used interchangeably, there is a difference between the two terms that is disturbing. Climate change refers to long-term and severe changes in the earth’s climate. These are the kind of changes that come from shifts in the earth’s orbit or variations sun’s output. This is the kind of change that can last centuries.
Climate change is a big deal. The planet is not too big for us to screw up.
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