Climate Change

Sarah Hickey Climate Change Essay May 7, 2012

Climate Change has a great effect on how the world works. As the population of the world grows so does the technology used and the pollution given out by the modern world’s new tools and ways of life. People say they couldn’t live without some of this technology like cars and oil, but what if it would mean the whole planet will have to pay for it all in the future?

Before watching the documentary I knew that pollution was taking a huge toll on the planet’s climate. Oil spills, deforestation, garbage pollution, traffic ruining the air, over the years we’ve seen it all on the nightly news describing how we are destroying our world with all this unnecessary pollution. Just last year there was an awful oil spill in the USA that destroyed a lot of beach and wildlife in the surrounding area. People seem to easily forget all the bad in the world after it isn’t in the news anymore. The planet’s temperature is rising to the point where the polar ice caps are beginning to melt away. This is a big deal for all life there, because they will eventually lose their natural habitats and become extinct.

I never thought about how politically driven Global Warming is, scientists are getting paid a lot of money to write reports about the effects Global Warming is having on the world weather or not it is true or false. The common belief is that the rise of CO² is the cause of climate change but according to the movie, the CO² is actually fallowing the rise in temperature not causing it. By digging deep into the arctic ice, scientists have found that the temperature has been rising and falling for centuries. Scientists have found that in the medieval times there was a very big rise in the temperature called “The Medieval Warm Period”. Polar bears and other arctic animals (not to mention humans) all survived this period up to modern day, so why wouldn’t they this time around?

The “Little Ice Age” was a period of time that occurred after the medieval warm period when everything began to cool down. It was not a true ice age and the exact beginning of the cold weather is unknown but believed to have started around the 13th century and ended around the end of the 19th century. Sun spots on the sun are believed to be the cause of warmer weather; the more spots the warmer the weather. They are caused by intense magnetic activity on the sun’s surface.

In my opinion, climate change is a having major effects on the earth. You can notice this change when you go from being in a big city to the open country; the air quality is very different in the two places. All the pollution from humans in the world from the things that are supposed to make life easier seems to be making the world a harder place to live in. The pollution is going to kill off a lot of vital species and for some people in different countries it will mean food will be even harder to come by. I would like to know more about what we could do to help stop climate change from happening more and to help make a better eco friendly future for the world, but that would all depend on how much the present society wants the world to be cleaner and healthier to live in. No one can be truly sure of what will happen to the future climate but one thing’s for sure, if change doesn’t happen soon the world will become an unlivable environment and that will end the human species.