Like most everyone on this blog I know very little about my topic of climate change. I don't watch very many channels like CNN and I don't read The NY times or The Wall Street Journal, I don't even hardly watch any local news for that matter. I am really interested in the climate change because I want to know the facts. I want to know if global warming is truly real, and if it is I want to know why we are doing so little to stop it or even slow it down.
One of the biggest reasons why I am interested in the climate change is because I am a really big fan/lover of animals. I think that the polar bear is one of the most amazing animals on the planet today. I have heard figures where within forty or fifty years our polar ice shelf will be decreased to half of what it originally was. In turn it would wiped out over two-thirds of the world's polar bear population and put them well on their way to extinction. I happened to be watching a show on the History channel called MonsterQuest (where they try to locate unknown/fictitious animals in the wild) and they were searching for bears of ungodly size. While they did not locate a monster bear, what they did find in the upper part of Alaska was a dead carcass of young bear which was half polar bear and half grizzly bear. This was quite a discovery because the two types of bears are not known to coexist in the same regions. Scientists had figured that the polar bear had stepped onto Alaskan terrain when the ice caps had reached the state, then when they receded the bear was trapped. As for the grizzly bear they assumed that maybe human influence scared the bear up further north. It is not only polar bears that are on the chopping block, there are several other animals which could and will go extinct if nothing is done to prevent climate change on the earth.
I visted Los Angeles earlier this year in march, and although it is a beautiful city there is a thick cloud like cover of smog that hangs above(sometimes so thick you can hardly see a mile or two through it). This makes me realize that it doesn't take a genius to figure out the pollutants we emitt are taking a toll on the ozone which in turn takes a toll on the earth. Climate change is very apparent to be linked to the carbon from all the different types of fuel that we burn. I really believe that climate change is real and maybe what we do on this earth at the moment won't have any effect on us, but I think it is very selfish to not think about future generations to come. It seems unfair that even kids born today could be at serious risk with the climate change. I feel like they should not have to inheret the mistakes that everyone on the world has made. The world is an ongoing cycle and with the discovery of fossil fuels it seems like we have been dissrupting the cycle. There is no telling what exactly will happen in the future, but I think it is pretty safe to say if we continue to burn the same fuels there will be consequences.
I think that we should start putting an end to the global warming by having the governments of the world accept that our fossil fuels are not the answer to a clean earth. Until we have figured out a solution to burning a clean fuel everyone should do their part to try to burn less fossil fuels and make sure to do little things like recycle instead of throwing everything in the garbage.
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Interesting about the bears--another sign that things are shifting up north.
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify, the smog in LA is directly related to global warming or to damage to the ozone layer (those are three distinct problems, although they are all affected by burning fossil fuels).
Try to get a clearer sense of what is going on with climate change (even a quick read of the Wikipedia article on climate change would help) and the material in Ch. 3 in the textbook should be helpful too.
Both of your initial questions (is climate change real? and why isn't more being done?) are good, and you can explore them further in your other entries.