Science says climate change will continue to get worse
by Xander Whipple
In 2017 world leaders went to Bonn, Germany for a climate change convention where they discussed implementation of the Paris Agreement. The agreement is trying to prevent global temperature change and stop it from reaching a two-degree Celsius rise. In June 2017 President Trump announced his intentions to leave the agreement by 2020.
Much has been said about those two degrees, and it is controversial. It’s believed that Greenland and West Antarctica will become unstable and begin to melt at an unstoppable rate. Some estimate that if the west Antarctic ice sheet melts it would cause sea levels rise more than ten feet.
“Human-caused climate change is the biggest issue that my generation and students behind me are going to have to deal with,” Dr. Dasch Houdeshel said. “It permeates every aspect of our economy. Globally and locally, we’re already seeing catastrophic shifts in our water resources, how animals are changing, and how pollution is affecting where we live. Science says that is only going to get worse in the very near future.”
The main goal of the Paris Agreement is to reduce climate change. Deforestation accounts for ten percent of all global warming emissions, and the ongoing burning of the Amazon is a big problem. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen and then store the excess carbon. When trees are cut down, burned, or rot they release all the carbon dioxide. When these fires happen, it causes the trees to release all the CO2 in them.
The Amazon is important for a lot of reasons. It is the world’s largest tropical rainforest. Covering 5.5 million kilometers, is home to over 390 billion individual trees, 40,000 plant species, and over 2.5 million insect species. Twenty percent of the world’s known birds live in the Amazon. There are three thousand types of fish and 430 different types of mammals. Around 400-500 indigenous tribes live in the Amazon. It’s believed that about fifty of those tribes have never had contact with the outside world.
Deforestation affects human health too. Deforestation drives wild animals out of their natural habitats and closer to human populations. This creates a greater frequency of diseases that can harm people. Research has shown that thirty one percent of outbreaks and new emerging diseases are linked to deforestation, such as Nipah, Nika, Ebola.
Although the burning of the rain forest is making climate change worse, Dr. Gibbons still is hopeful.
“I’m optimistic that I think that we can conserve a lot of the current rain forest and protect it,” he said. “But when these events happen it makes you think that we’re not control, and if we are not in control we need to fix things or it’s gonna go downhill.”
