Climate Change as a Serious Threat

Isn’t it extremely hot today? Do you remember those days when the weather used to be not extremely hot or cold? My reason for asking you all this is to address the topic of climatic change. Since past years, climate has been a very crucial topic affecting each one of us and our planet Earth. Climate change is a fact of life. We need to act urgently if we are to avoid an irreversible build-up of greenhouse gases and global warming at a potentially huge cost to the economy and society worldwide.

My contention is that climate change already had tremendous effects on the environment as well as our daily lives, and we must do our best to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in order to compensate the rise in global temperature.

According to the official website of the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology, as of late 2017, the Earth had warmed by roughly more than 1 degree Celsius, since 1910, when records began at a global scale. That figure includes the surface of the ocean. The warming is greater over land, and greater still in the Arctic and parts of Antarctica. That number may sound low. We experience much larger temperature swings in our day-to-day lives from weather systems and from the changing of seasons. But when you average across the entire planet and over months or years, the temperature differences get far smaller. So a rise of 2 degrees Celsius since the 19th century is actually very high.

The substantial warming that has already occurred explains why much of the world’s land ice is starting to melt and the oceans are rising at an accelerating pace. The heat accumulating in the Earth because of human emissions is roughly equal to the heat that would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs exploding across the planet every day. Scientists believe most and probably all of the warming since 1950 was caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. If emissions continue being ignored, they say the global warming could ultimately exceed 8 degrees Celsius, which would transform the planet to a world of hell and therefore undermine its capacity to support a large human population.

The threat of climate change needs to be taken very seriously. Climate change and its impact on our environment, our economies and our security, is the defining issue of our era. But every day of inaction makes its consequences more irreversible, so we need to act now.