Climate change is manifesting everywhere. I do not want to make an already bleak picture even uglier, but it seems that is what a significant portion of our nation needs. We are in the middle of climate change and at the beginning of the sixth mass extinction. Deserts are growing. The coral reef is dying. Coastlines are eroding. Wildfires are burning.
Climate change; rising temperatures, wildfires, drought, hurricanes and tropical storms
We might not understand why it’s not always hot or dry or how it can flood over here but be desert over there unless we examine the evidence on a global scale and compare it to climates throughout history.
I’m not a scientist, much less a climatologist, and even I can see the writing on the wall. Hurricanes and tropical storms are increasing in size and scope. Drought and wildfires currently pepper the western quarter of the United States; California, Oregon, Washington, etc. It is, however, important to consider that wildfires in America are relatively innocuous when compared to those in South America, Africa, Australia, China or the former Soviet Union.
This only begins to illustrate how climate change is impacting our planet and thus all species, right now, not sometime in the distant future. The wildfires are merely a symptom. The drought is what I call a geological disease caused by climate change.
China is being over-run with desert. Deserts are growing worldwide. Ocean temperatures have increased by nearly two degrees in the last 100 or so years. That does not sound like a lot to a layman. I can’t feel a thing if the temperature changes one and a half degrees! I’m still trying to understand it fully, but I will try to explain here why it matters so.
Half a degree can kill a lot of coral reef
The European Geosciences Union published a study in 2016 that considered the effect that just half a degree would have on our climate. The study found that just half a degree, or an increase of a third, would likewise affect climate phenomena by roughly the same amount. Longer heat waves, by about a third.
More numerous and larger hurricanes and Tropical Storms, also by about a third. There would be increases in sea level of about a third.
In some cases, the situation can be much worse though. When considering the coral reef, these scientists say that where we stand now, with an increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, the coral reef has a chance of adapting to the greater ocean temperatures. But when that number reaches two that opportunity slips away. Even if one disregards the extensive and diverse ecosystems, they contain within them, and coral reefs protect our coastlines from erosion that results from wave action, hurricanes, and tropical storms.
Mission
I have written this before, and I am more than certain I will be writing it again, but we have a mission.
We do not have the time to dally with scientifically ignorant politicians deciding the fate of our world. We can no longer afford to allow fundamentally religious, ignorant, greedy, gluttonous, deceitful, psychopathic cretons to make laws for the rest of the world regarding anything more complicated than where to put the trash receptacle. We have let them ravage our planet in our name for far too long.
