Unbearably blue (forgive us).
According to NASA, sea levels will rise up to 8 feet by 2100 if we continue carbon emissions at our current rate.1 That’s a lot of water! The damage resulting from this would be utterly catastrophic and many parts of the world, perhaps all of it, would be rendered uninhabitable, especially with enough time and inaction.
That’s a pretty depressing outcome, right?
Well currently, the main sources of carbon emissions are:
- Transportation (27% of 2020 greenhouse gas emissions)
- Electricity production (25%)
- Industry (24%)
- Commercial and residential (13%)
- Agriculture (11%)
- Land Use and Forestry (13%)
For the first four of these six sources, (greenhouse gas) emissions in general come primarily from burning fossil fuels,2 which are made from decomposing plants and animals. Sounds kind of resourceful, but in actuality once these fuels are burned, that’s what produces the carbon dioxide and allows heat to become trapped in our atmosphere.
We guess you could say it’s getting hot in here… Okay, we’ll stop. Though as a consequence, this rise in temperature with no way for the extra heat to escape causes all the bad stuff that is currently happening like the very evident melting of glaciers from Greenland to Antarctica.3
While most of us will be gone by time things get to truly apocalyptic-type levels, there are people alive today that will experience firsthand why we should’ve been working together all along.
However, there’s good news–there’s time. Not a lot of it, but there’s time, and we’re so glad to have you as a reader of our blog. Because that means that people out there care about this big, beautiful, blue world of ours and that’s the only edge humanity needs to create a positive snowball effect.
The first step? To talk about it.
A lot.
References:
- NASA. (2022, November 11). The effects of climate change. NASA. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://climate.nasa.gov/effects/
- Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). EPA. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions
- Irfan, U. (2019, December 23). The ice we’ve lost to climate change this past decade, visualized. Vox. Retrieved February 23, 2023, from https://www.vox.com/2019/12/23/21030500/climate-change-ice-thaw-arctic-antarctica-greenland