Introduction

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of climate change at some point recently. Now, whether you believe it’s real or not is a completely different story (it’s real btw), but you’ve probably heard of it. But even then, there’s a good chance that you don’t actually understand what it is, like most people. There is A LOT of misinformation that has spread about climate change which has likely skewed your knowledge of the subject, and we want to fix that. So, we’re going to do our best to explain it to you in the simplest way possible that still gives you an in-depth understanding. You’re welcome. 

Common Myths

Like we said earlier, climate change is just one of those things where people try to hide the truth in order to push their own political agendas, but we’re not going to get into that. Instead, we just want you to be aware of things that people will say to throw you off. 

WARNING! DO NOT BELIEVE THE FOLLOWING BOLDED STATEMENTS!

1. Climate change isn’t real.

Look, time and time again, scientists have disproved theories that climate change isn’t real. There is a worldwide scientific consensus that climate change is real. I mean, more than 97% of climate scientists believe in climate change. Don’t believe us? Visit this website (after reading the rest of this post 😉): https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/ 

2. Climate change isn’t going to affect you now. 

Climate change will affect all of us. In fact, it already is! And, even if you are not in the direct line of impact, climate change will affect you in other ways (which we will explain in the Effects section below). 

3. The climate has always been changing. 

Our reaction after hearing this: 🤦

Technically, this statement is correct but it is also a terrible argument to refute climate change because people who say this really don’t understand what climate change actually is. The phrase “climate change” refers to the unusual patterns and events in the climate of the present and future as a result of human activity in the recent past. Climate change is not about the four seasons. 

4. Climate change is going to end the world. 

Wrong. Don’t worry about the world. The world will be just fine. The world has gone through 5 separate extinctions. The world will fix itself. It’s the species in this world that you should worry about. If we don’t do anything, the sixth mass extinction won’t be too far into the future. You could even be living in it right now… 

5. Specific climate events can prove or disprove climate change. 

A lot of times, you’ll hear people say something along the lines of, “Wow, it’s was pretty hot this week. I guess climate change really is real” or “Climate change??? Yeah, right. 🙄 It’s barely 5 degrees outside today!” You should now that these statements are convenient to use, but hold little to no scientific backing. Climate change, and its components (global warming, rising sea levels, etc.), are observed on a much larger scale. So, while the Earth does get warmer, that doesn’t mean that a warm week is a direct result of global warming and it also doesn’t mean you won’t have cold days at all either. A more accurate statement would be “9 out of the top 10 hottest years on record have occurred within the past decade (2010s) with all of these 10 years occurring since 1998.” 

Ok… then, what is climate change?

Put simply, climate change is an overarching subject pertaining to the drastic transformations in our natural world in the recent past, mainly as a result of human activity. If that was a little too abstract, here’s a much simpler definition for climate change: a bunch of different natural problems, that were mainly caused by humans, combined to form a really big problem that is threatening our lives. Here are some of the details without getting into too many of the specifics just yet: 

Causes

We aren’t gonna bore you with every single cause of climate change (I mean eventually we are, but not right now), but instead, we’ll go over the three most important ones.

1. Releasing Greenhouse Gases into the Atmosphere

To understand this cause, we first have to understand what greenhouse gasses are. Greenhouse gasses, in the simplest terms, are different types of gases that trap heat within Earth’s atmosphere. These gases, often produced by humans, are incredibly dangerous because of the long-term effect they can have, and have had, on Earth’s ecosystems. Though greenhouse gases can be produced by natural occurrences, like cow farts (methane), 95% of greenhouse gases are produced by humans, according to climate.nasa.gov. The main contributor to human produced greenhouse gases is the burning of fossil fuels (gasoline). Activities that we think are necessary, like driving our cars, are actually some of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gases because they burn fossil fuels. (Image would go here). Additionally, almost every economic sector contributes to the production of greenhouse gases because we rely on the burning of fossil fuels for almost everything in our daily lives. So, yeah. Greenhouse gases are a problem. 

(https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions)

2. Depleting Natural Resources

The depletion of natural resources is not a new concept to Americans. The U.S. has been struggling with this problem since the dawn of industrialization in the early 1900s. The problem now is that other countries are getting in on it too. Deforestation is a prime example of how natural resources are depleting around the world. Forests account for about 31% of the world’s land surface (earth-policy.org). They are so beneficial to us because trees are able to use carbon dioxide to grow, and swaths of trees like forests take in A LOT of carbon dioxide (one of the greenhouse gases). According to tenmilliontress.org, “an acre of forest can absorb twice the CO2 produced by the average car’s annual mileage.” Yet, according to conserve-energy-future.com, 18 million acres of forest are destroyed every year, resulting in more carbon dioxide in our ecosystem. It’s not just with forests, this same pattern can be seen with other scarce resources like oil and metals. Even worse than the obvious natural effects of cutting down trees and mining iron, these resources won’t last forever. Barely anything we take from the environment gets put back in its place. In other words, when we drill oil and take more and more and more and more (and more) of it out of the ground, we don’t get it back; we just take it away, never to be seen again. Imagine the world runs out of oil tomorrow, the effects would be catastrophic, sending the world into an economic crisis and most likely war over oil reserves. The worst part is, this event may not be too far into the future, and could happen within this century (your lifetime).

3. Lack of Significant Action

Now you may, probably not, BUT you may be asking yourself, “Why is nobody noticing this obvious exploitation of resources that is quickly leading us to our demise?” Well the answer is simple. People don’t think addressing climate change is good for the economy. Which, in a sense, is true. The economy, IN THE SHORT-TERM, will not do well. However, acting on climate change as soon as possible will save us from having to do something about it in the future, which will only become more expensive due to its increased effects. 

Another part of the problem is that the problems the environment is facing are usually hidden from us. With the economic policy being based around globalization, natural resources are not being taken from our environment, but often from third-world countries, where the people rely on their environment the most. Instead of cutting down huge forests in the U.S., the wood is instead being gathered from the Amazon rainforest. Similarly, instead of creating huge mines in U.S. cities, mines are created for cheaper prices in African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

With the government neglecting to take action, and with people being hidden from the truth, the situation can only get worse. 

Effects 

1. Global Warming

Put very simply, when sunlight enters Earth’s atmosphere, it hits off Earth’s surface and bounces back into space, but greenhouse gases in the atmosphere prevent the rebound back into space by serving as a barrier for the heat to be unable to exit the Earth. By trapping the heat within Earth’s atmosphere, the heat has nowhere to go so it just stays and warms up the earth. This is the simple science of global warming. 

2. Rising Sea Level

When the planet warms, two things happen that cause the sea level to rise: ice caps melt and expanding seawater. Melting ice caps cause sea levels to rise because as the ice turns to water from higher temperatures, the water adds to the ocean’s water, which causes the overall water in the ocean to increase. Seawater expands because of a concept called thermal expansion, which basically says that things expand as the temperature gets warmer. The combination of these factors is causing the sea level of our planet to rise at a rapid pace, which could submerge entire cities in the near future. 

3. Intense Storms

Another aspect of climate change is the increasing intensity of storms. This is due to the added water vapor, a greenhouse gas, to the atmosphere which, according to usgs.gov, “becomes fuel for more powerful storms to develop.” The intense storms combined with rising sea levels can be fatal because of a higher chance of floods. 

4. Mass Migration

Once the effects of climate change mentioned above become more apparent, people who live in the most vulnerable or hardest hit areas will likely move to areas that are expected to be less influenced by climate change at that time. This process will continue to occur as climate change develops, leaving some of the most populated places on Earth deserted while others will experience an overwhelming influx of people. This means that the planet’s entire demographic will change. 

Solutions

1. Renewable Energy

One of the most effective ways to build a cleaner and healthier environment is by switching to renewable energy (aka clean energy). As we stated earlier, the burning of fossil fuels is a major contributor to climate change. So, if we can replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, more jobs can be created while also adapting to a sustainable solution. Renewable energy can take many forms, including solar, wind, and hydro energy, with each one serving as a better alternative to fossil fuels. 

2. Effective Policies

In recent years, climate change has become an increasingly political issue, with a majority of pressure being placed on politicians to act. Over the years, they have proposed ideas such as the Green New Deal and joining the Paris Climate Accord to combat climate change. One of the issues, however, is that politicians are debating about the wrong thing. They are debating about whether climate change is real or not instead of debating about what we should do about it. Precious time is being wasted talking about the wrong issue, and we are the ones paying for it. 

3. New Innovations

Day by day, we are seeing new and promising innovations come into the world market that would help slow down climate change. The problem that we are facing with these new innovations is a general wariness about whether they are effective and can replace existing products. Take CarbonCure, for example. They are a company that developed a technology that would inject carbon dioxide into concrete mixtures “to reduce [the concrete industry’s] carbon footprint without compromising performance.” Since the concrete industry is responsible for around 7% of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, CarbonCure’s technology is a great way for concrete manufacturers to continue their business while helping the environment. However, despite proof that CarbonCure’s solution will make concrete stronger than before, these manufacturers are still hesitant to adapt to the new innovation. The more people, especially businesses, become more open to new innovations that will help the reduction of climate change, the better off things will be. 

4. Education

This is probably the most important thing that we need to do NOW and is our main goal at SMHclimate. Education needs to happen on several different scales, including adding climate change to school curriculums, advertising more about climate change (similar to how the COVID-19 facts and guidelines were advertised), and increased exposure to factual climate change news. If people get educated on what climate change actually is (meaning, a scientific and unbiased explanation), then the rest of the pieces will start to fall in place and significant progress will be made.