Background Information
Climate change is defined as a change in global or regional climate patterns. Climate is different from weather as weather is short term and climate is a long term. While the climate is always changing, the recent changes within the past century is highly alarming. The recent change in the climate have been attributed to human activity through increasing the use of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases. There are four major greenhouse gases and they all are fine for the atmosphere when released in small amounts but with the increased energy usages, there is an excess amount being released into the atmosphere. This excess of gases gets trapped in the atmosphere and increase the average temperature on the earth. Then a dominos effect falls into place and issues arise. When the temperature increases, ice caps in the Arctic melt increasing the amount of volume of water in our oceans. This can lead to rises in sea levels, increased natural disasters and more floods. There needs to be an urgency to combat climate change.
The Problem
The current state of the political climate in the United States is tense. Of all the issues debated in Washington, climate change is not one that is saved from polarity. Many claim immediate action needs to be taken while there are some who believe the whole thing is a hoax. While the country is split on this issue, we are missing what is most essential. Climate change has officially made its way to physical effects on the earth like rising sea levels in Miami and creating dead spots in the Chesapeake Bay. The thing is, there is no Planet B. The more time we spend arguing about weather or not it is real the less likely we are to be able to fix this before it is too late. While more research can be done, 97% of scientists agree the climate change is caused by human activity. We need to move on from the discussion of whether or not it is real to how we are going to combat it. Here is a video of Bill Nye highlighting what climate change is and why it is so important that we as one planet come together to fight it.
Bill Nye explaining climate change.