Christmas in July
How Climate Change is Hurting Our Environment
“The key to climate change now is to adapt and have communities, our state, our nation, and our world become more resilient in the face of these largely unescapable impacts,” says Dr. Christopher Labosier, an enviromental sciences professor at Longwood University.
During October in central Virginia, temperature highs reached the upper 70’s and low 80’s, with the temperature lows barely reaching the mid 60’s.
Not only was Virginia susceptible to this warmer weather, so was the rest of The United States. This increase in warmer temperatures is climate change.
Climate change is having a more noticeable impact on our world every day. With documented evidence of climate change occuring in our environment, steps need to be taken to reduce the effects of climate change and prevent future catostrophes from happening.
Climate change is the heating of the atmosphere around us. Kirsten Cornwell, a senior environmental sciences major says, “Climate change is the change in weather patterns, including temperature increases, sea level increases, and frequency of natural disasters. This happens locally and on a worldwide scale that is largely caused by the increasing amount of greenhouse gases released into our atmosphere.”
Greenhouse gases include Carbon dioxide, Methane, Nitrous oxide, and Fluorinated gases. These gases keep the earth’s temperature warm, but with a substantial increase in these gases, the earth becomes warmer.
“Greenhouse gases get trapped in the atmosphere due to our mistreatment of the environment,” says Sarah Kamen, a biology major at Longwood University.
Climate change is beginning to be seen in our own enviroment, and people are starting to listen despite the fact for years’ scientists have been warning the dangers and signs of climate change. “Climate change has been occurring since the industrial revolution way back when, but it definitely has had a significant increase in the rate of change in the past century,” says Cornwell.
“We see less Artic sea, melting glaciers and ice sheets, along with that we see rising sea levels. What’s also important to understand is that climate change is not some distant, far away phenomenon. It is here now; we have documented evidence of this,” says Labosier.
“Under Obama, The United States was a part of The Paris Agreement where every nation but two signed and agreed to work towards reducing greenhouse gas emission. But with Trump, who says he doesn’t believe in climate change, he pulled The United States out of The Paris Agreement, and expressed efforts to roll back The United States work towards green energy,” says Cornwell.
In addition to this Cornwell says, “I definitely think that climate change needs to be treated as a bipartisan issue, not a liberal issue or conservative issue because, in the end it impacts everyone no matter who you vote for.”
U.S News and World Reports stated that if The United States and the Trump Administration do not begin to fix the way it is currently controlling climate change, The United States will be out billions of dollars, and an economic catastrophe is in line.
There are many ways to prevent climate change from expanding. The biggest way being the addition of clean energy in our society. Clean energy is energy collected from renewable resources found in our earth, like solar panels and wind turbans.
65% of energy in The United States comes from fossil fuels, while only 15% comes from clean energy, or renewable resources, according to the U.S Energy Information Administration.
“There are countries in Europe like Denmark that run completely off clean energy and have no greenhouse gas emission, which is crazy. The United States is a lot bigger than Denmark so I don’t expect The United States to be running off clean energy alone in the near future, but working towards clean energy and reducing The United States dependency on fossil fuels is a major way to reduce climate change risk,” says Cornwell.
Another way to prevent climate change, is education. “If climate change was taught to kids at a young age I think they would grow up with more respect for the environment and be more environmentally conscious of what they do,” says Cornwell.
“Beginning to spread knowledge and education about climate change will do more for the future of the environment than people think,” says Kamen.
