Isaiah Bayardo, Courier Staff Writer
Wherever you live, whether it be obvious or subtle, the effects of our continually changing climate cannot be ignored anymore. Do fires around your area seem to get worse every year? Do you wonder why it seems warmer than usual? That’s because an obvious pattern has been forming over the span of several decades. If you think that scientists and their followers are fear-mongering dunderheads spreading infectious hullabaloo to easily impressionable people, then you need to think again. It might be hard to change your mind if you believe otherwise, but planet Earth is currently and continually heating up, and it’s primarily because of us. This phenomenon affects every corner of our planet and trends us in the wrong direction. It could take a long time before everyone realizes how urgent and crucial this is to take seriously. By that point in time, it could be way too late to save the Earth and our children. Yes, you might not be alive to have much of this affect you, but if you have children or plan to have them, you are going to want them to live, right?
One element that climate change influences is the severity of natural disasters. This includes hurricanes, fires, floods, droughts and more. Global warming is logically linked to predictions of severe droughts that will affect regions such as the American Southwest. Speaking of the American Southwest; if carbon emissions continue at their current rate, a bad drought will be triggered. Not just any old drought. Not just like the Dust Bowl. Not even like the 16th-century Mexican drought that featured cocoliztli. What the Southwest has more than a 90% chance of experiencing is a megadrought; one worse than any drought in the last two thousand years. Hopefully, that doesn’t cause vertigo, black tongue, jaundice, head and neck nodules, and extreme bleeding in anyone. What the droughts correspond with is the fact that temperature averages are projected to increase by 6 to 9°F by 2100. Hurricanes are also affected by climate change. Future Category 4 and 5 hurricanes similar to Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina will give cities like New Orleans and Dhaka even bigger problems than what they have experienced before. Rising sea levels alone darken the prospects of these cities; so add a friendly hurricane into the mix, and that hurricane could be the monster that completely obliterates them for good. Compared to what we are used to now and in the past, hurricanes and fires will continue to become more menacing and will become harder to recover from and prevent.
With more and more trees becoming tinder-like due to droughts, fire-prone areas are taking on devastating amounts of damage from unrelenting wildfires more often than before. This will affect tree species badly enough to force them to retreat or die out. The maple-beech-birch forests, abundant in New England, are a notable example. If you are used to seeing lots of them whether you live in New York, Vermont, New Hampshire or Pennsylvania, it would be a culture shock to visit the same area in the 2070-2100 era. Pests have damaged trees and negatively affected the ecosystem. One recent example is the routine invasion gypsy moths on Rhode Island trees. The 2016 invasion was noted by local experts as being the worst infestation they had seen in a long time. Sea levels, as you may have heard, are already affecting and displacing low-lying states like Florida, Louisiana and other major sea level places. Models have predicted that sea levels could rise by one meter, or “by close to two meters in total (more than 6 feet) by the end of the century.” Six feet is a lot. If you live near the coast, think about that. Current trends have painted carbon emissions rising more over the decades, causing Antarctica and Greenland glaciers to melt faster. In order to preserve Antarctica in close to its present-day state, worldwide carbon emissions would need to be cut sharply. And that has a low probability.
We are also going to be affected by climate change agriculturally. Rising temperatures, more frequent droughts, the increase in carbon emissions, and the change in distribution of pests is happening now and expected to progress, which will certainly put a damper on crop output, especially in low latitude countries. Yes, the milder temperatures will help some crops to blossom in cooler climates, but the droughts and the higher temperatures will hurt climates that are already known to get hot. All those countries, with the crops they grow right now, will have to prepare and think about finding better suited crops or suffer from a sharp drop in food supply in the near future. The U.S. plays a major role in the distribution of crops and food around the world, supplying 25% of all grains on the global market. But with a rise of 3.6°F, national production of corn can drop from 10% to a whopping 30%. This is one stat that shows how much “just a few degrees” can impact us. Although low to moderate levels of warming could help the yield of crops, higher level warming, as we are expected to experience, will have the opposite effect. Farmers will be forced to spend more time and money on avoiding increasingly unavoidable pests and weeds. The time of the year in which crops grow could be altered, which would lessen the suitability of habitats for native animals, therefore rupturing symbiotic relationships between plants and animals.
A major role player in this entire process is carbon dioxide. Clarifying what I have said before, its the footprint in our atmosphere that has been steadily climbing year after year. The Paris Agreement, chock- full with the support of 190 countries, aims at stagnating those emissions over the next 20 years. Although the United States wants to withdraw now, the sheer magnitude of climate change could force the U.S. back into it. Why does carbon dioxide and its emissions matter? As a greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide causes global temperatures to rise. The global temperature has risen 1 degree over the last century; which is expected to be accompanied by further warming. 1 degree may sound very minuscule, but it has caused many significant changes in the severity of droughts and fires, sea levels, the state of glaciers and of Antarctica, and crop output among many other variables. Carbon emissions have been at an astounding but unsurprising record high for a while. And it’s only worsening. Letting emission levels go crazy without a leash will only exacerbate the effects we are experiencing right now. In addition to the above, the spread of diseases is a serious matter. Diseases, which have historically avoided places that were too cold, are going to slowly spread to those places when Earth makes them warm enough. Malaria, cholera, Lyme disease, and dengue fever are historically climate wary diseases that rely on mosquitoes to travel anywhere. The recent Zika virus epidemic is an example of the effects that climate change has. El Niños, which are another weather-related phenomenon expected to increase in frequency, have affected malaria so that the chances for the pesky disease rise five-fold the year after an El Niño. With a temperature rise of 2-3ºC, the chances of malaria rise 3-5% worldwide. What this means is that hundreds of millions of us have the potential to contract it. Official malaria cases have been very rare in the U.S. in recent decades, but a return of this awful disease is not out of the realm of possibility.
Every element of Earth is and will continue to be affected by climate change. I have mentioned natural disasters such as hurricanes, droughts, and fires going berserk, sea levels that are slated to rise to the point of no return, diseases that threaten to disseminate and overwhelm entire countries, and the pest-and-drought-battered agricultural situation. That cannot be ignored anymore. Once the importance of climate change and its impact on us is realized, then everyone can work together and help prevent the worst from happening. It is not too late to act on our own. The reason there is such a big range in possible temperature rise is because we have the power to decrease the amount of heat-trapping emissions that are released. Humans are the main reason that this is happening, and there is no rule in place to limit power plants in the United States. They are continuing to release startling amounts of carbon dioxide in the air because of business reasons. They want money. But with the help of the general public and swarms of healthy-minded companies and organizations, we can influence them to consider otherwise. If we can aim ourselves in the right direction, generations full of healthy, normally functioning human beings can exist and continue to treat the Earth well if our current generations build the groundwork. This is why climate change needs to be heard and taken seriously.