Climate change
Climate change is a massive problem in the modern society. Climate change is changing the world at an incredibly fast rate, but we need to stop it. Climate change will have massive consequences for humans and other species on earth, yet we don't really prioritize stopping it. Countries have different prioritizations, and are struggling to cooperate to stop climate change, but still we need to fix this problem, and you as an individual can do very much to help prevent it.
What is climate change?
Climate change is the change of weather and temperatures over a longer period of time. When the climate changes, the general weather in an area or more changes. When we talk about global climate change, we mean that the weather and temperatures across the globe is changing. Modern global climate change is human made, which means that the global climate changes we see today is a consequence of human actions.
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Background photo by: Mike Erskine
Global warming
Modern global warming is a massive global heating event of the earth that is taking place right now. Although global warming can occur naturally, modern global warming is proven to be caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. Human activity including energy production, burning of fossil fuels, production and transportation amongst other human activity all utilize methods that emit greenhouse gases, strengthening the greenhouse effect.
Global warming is human-induced and essentially caused by humanity overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases; we are destroying our own planet, and everything that comes with it.
But what is global warming exactly? How much CO2 do we emit? What are the causes and consequences of global warming? And what can we do to prevent it?
What is global warming?
Global warming is the general rising of global temperatures on earth, modern global warming refers to the global warming that’s currently ongoing.
In 2020 the total global emissions of CO2 was just over 35 billion tons(!), according to a chart shown by the United Nations that again was taken from the Global Carbon Project 2021. The average inhabitant on earth emits an average of 4.5 tons of CO2 annually, written by the same source, but this isn’t really relevant because the average CO2 emissions by country varies a lot.
Causes and consequences:
Global warming is a phenomenon caused by exceeding amounts of greenhouse gases ending up in the atmosphere. Now, greenhouse gases are vital for the earth to maintain life, because greenhouse gases drive the greenhouse effect, which is what keeps the temperature on earth habitable. However, by overloading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we empower the heating effect of the greenhouse effect beyond the suitable temperature for life. The greenhouse effect is necessary for all life on earth, but when we strengthen the effect by emitting more greenhouse gases than the natural amount, it affects the natural
Photo by: William Bossen
Photo of ice floating in the ocean.
state of the greenhouse effect which is naturally in the sweet spot for enabling life to flourish here on earth. The greenhouse effect is what keeps a planet the temperature it is, and the gases in its atmosphere determine what the temperature is like on every planet where the greenhouse effect exists. In all cases, on any planet, where the greenhouse effect strengthens, like it's doing here on earth, it causes the temperatures to rise, which is what we call global warming. The greenhouse effect works by trapping radiation from sun rays, keeping the heat on earth. The light rays that hit earth would escape by being reflected by earth, but greenhouse gases send the light rays back again towards earth so that the heat stays here on earth for longer, while some still gets reflected and manages to escape into space.
When more greenhouse gases fill the atmosphere, more light rays get reflected back towards earth, essentially trapping more heat on earth for longer, while less gets reflected back into space, resulting in a heating effect to take place. Greenhouse gases come from a lot of things like factories, transportation vehicles like cars, ships and planes that run on fossil fuels, and energy production often utilizes fossil fuels like coal or gas, and burning fossil fuels lead to greenhouse gas emissions.
Global warming will, and currently do, have massive consequences on earth, both globally and locally. The increased temperatures will cause extreme weather like ice melting and droughts, and increase their commonness. As a result of this, many people will get dehydrated and malnutritioned, and this can cause diseases and illnesses. Climate change will also make different species lose their habitats, disrupting the food chain and unstabilizing it. If temperatures rise too much people will be exposed to dangerous temperatures and potentially get overheated. In the worst cases climate change results in death for humans and extinction of species, and the more unstable the food chain gets and the more species that go extinct, the possibility for agricultural growth and food production drastically decreases. As the effects of climate change grows, the growth and possibility for life shrink. Climate change will make the likelihood of people dying increase.
Photo by: Wesley Tingey
Photo of dry, cracked up earth.
What can we do?
Global warming is what causes climate change, and there are different drivers of global warming, some of which you can read about below. To prevent global temperatures from rising, there is a lot of things you can do to help! And it all involves lowering greenhouse gas emissions. You can make a massive difference, especially if you encourage others to make a change for the better as well! Together we can try and affect the decisions of the people with power as well, which can make for some really big and positive global changes for the earth and all humans!
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Here is a list of a few things you can do to help prevent greenhouse gas emissions:
1
Drive less!
Drive less, and use more public transportation or walk! This reduces your carbon footprint a lot, because you either stop all emissions by walking, or use less energy to transport more people!
2
Travel sustainably!
Try travelling locally as much as you can and with busses or trains instead of driving or flying! This way, you get as much as possible out of the energy needed to travel, since the energy is more spread and there is more people taking advantage of it.
3
Save electricity!
Save electricity, especially if electrcity in your home comes from fossil fuels. You can do this by showering for a shorter amount of time, turning off electrical appliances like lights, fans and fausets when they're not in use, and also you can try lowering the temperature in your home and wearing more clothes instead(assuming you live in a place where your house needs heating).
Give your foodchices a second thought!
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​Loads of foods are unsustainable. If a food is unsustainable or not, mostly comes down to three factors: where the food is from relative to where you live, if it's an animal product and if it has recyclable packaging. If you try to eat less animal products, eat local food, and choose the food product with recyclable packaging(If possible), you will lower your carbon footprint significantly! This doesn't mean that you can never eat meat, or never eat exotic foods, but the more consistent you are with these tips, the better!
Food waste
On earth we throw away a lot of food, and that is an enormous, often overlooked problem. Food waste is a driver of global warming, because food waste not only wastes food, but also energy, resources and land. Food production is a demanding process, and producing more food than we consume - or food that we throw away - is not sustainable, as food production also emits greenhouse gases. Thankfully though, food waste is one of the problems facing society that we as individuals can influence the most, and the easiest!
What is food waste?
In short terms food waste is edible food that get's thrown away. In 2019, 17% of all the food in the world that was available for consumers, got wasted, that's about 931 million tons of food, according to the United Nations! In total, around 1/3 of all the food in the world gets wasted, and that is about 1.3 billion tons of food annually(!), according to the United Nations.
​​​​​​​Causes and consequences:
A big reason food waste occurs is because food doesn't reach a specific criteria for it to be allowed to be sold in stores. In many countries different kinds of foods have specific criteria they need to fulfil in order to be allowed to be sold. For example fruits and vegetables often have to be a certain size, shape or color before being allowed to go to the stores that sell them. In some cases the food fruit or vegetable cannot be too small nor too big, and if they have any marks or bruises they are most likely wasted, even though they're completely edible.​​
In homes, many people throw away food because they're scared that it's gone bad due to the ‘best before’ date expiring. People rarely realize that the ‘best before’ label is only a label, referring to the time before the expected quality of the food product may go bad. By seeing, feeling,
Photo by: Mariana Medvedeva
Photo of half finished food
smelling and touching a food before throwing it away, you can actually decipher whether the food is good or bad to eat. Also, people commonly do not take care of their leftovers properly. After a meal, by storing the food you don’t eat, you can spare money, time, and do the earth a tiny favor! A little​ food here and there quickly adds up, and becomes huge amounts after a while therefore always finishing the food you prepare, or saving it for later will prevent a lot of food waste!​
What can we do to stop foodwaste?
​​Foodwaste is a massive problem, and causes a lot of unnecesarry use of valuable resources. Food consumption and production needs to be managed better, and us individuals can have a huge direct impact on foodwaste! Thankfully there are plenty of things we can do to lower our waste of food, and it is really simple!
Here is a list of a few things you can do to help prevent foodwaste:
Make a shopping list!
Make a list of what food you're going to buy before you go shopping, and stick to it!
1
Save leftovers!
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Instead of throwing your leftovers away after a meal, try to store it so that you have a fast-prepable meal to eat later! If you store food properly it can last quite a while, but still make sure that the food you spare is good to eat before eating it. Remember: Smell, see, feel and taste before throwing it away!
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The expiration date is misleading!
The 'best before' date label on foods is just the expected longevity of the quality of the food, but it doesn't mean that food has gone bad when the date has passed. By smelling, seeing, touching and tasteing a food before you throw it away, you figure out if the food is actually good or bad to eat.
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The expiration date is misleading!
​​Don't be afraid of the expiring date, smell, see, touch and taste if a food has gone bad before you potentially throw it away!
2
Save leftovers!
Instead of throwing
them
long to eat them, or else they
away leftovers, store
with them later so they
don't go to waste, but make
sure that you don't wait for too
and make a meal
will go bad.
Deforestation
Across the globe we have massive forests, spreading far and wide through every continent, and these forests holds an enormous amount of the earth's biodiversity, and they are massive carbon collectors! Since trees and forests store massive amounts of CO2, deforestation is an enormous driver of global warming. Still, humans deforest a lot of these natural treasures, and they are shrinking at a massive rate! But how much forest do we chop down? Why does it matter?
Photo of a halfway deforested forest
Photo by: Annie Spratt
What is deforestation?
Deforestation is when forest gets chopped down on purpose. This usually happens on larger scales, and is devestating for the species and wildlife living in the forest, resulting in them losing their habitats.
1 soccer field worth of rainforest gets lost every 6 seconds according to The Guardian in an article from 2020! In a minute, that would be 10 soccer fields worth of rainforest!
In a year, around 10 000 000 hectars worth of forest across the globe gets deforested, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. 10 000 000 hectars is a bit larger than the entire country of Portugal!
Deforestation causes so much greenhouse gas emissions that 10-15%(!) of the world's total greenhouse gas emissions comes from deforestation in some kind of way.
Causes and consequences:
The biggest cause of deforestation is agriculture. Around 90% of deforestation happens beacause of agricultural expansion, according to The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
Deforestation will and are having massive consequences. Trees store CO2 naturally, as they need CO2 to carry out the photosynthesis, and when they die, all the CO2 they stored gets released into the air and the atmosphere. There is usually no reforestation after the deforestation, as the goal is often to utilize the space left behind from the deforestation, for example for agricultural expansion. Therefore the emitted CO2 goes straight to the atmosphere, and there is nothing to compensate for the greenhouse gas emissions. So when the forests shrink there will be less trees, causing more and more CO2 to be released into the atmosphere, and less and less to get collected and stored.In
total around 10-15% of the worlds greenhouse gas emissions happens due to deforestation! Another big consequence of deforestation is the loss of biodiversity. Deforestation destroys the habitats of the different species living there, and therefore since different forests are habitats for so many different kinds of species, many species gets endangered or even go extinct. Species gets endangered due to deforestation because deforestation is such a big change that the species either don't have time to adapt to the new surroundings, or because they have to compete with other species for space, at expense for either their own specie or another.
Photo by: gryffyn m
Photo of a halfway deforested forest
How can we prevent deforestation?
Deforestation is such a big problem in the world that it needs to be taken into account, and we need to do something about it. It is more difficult for us as individuals to work against deforestation, since we can't really directly prevent people from deforesting, because that's beyond our circle of influence, but we can still do some things to indirectly help out the world's forests for the better!
Here is a list of a few things you can do to help prevent deforestation:
Don't use palm oils!
1
Try to not use palm oils, or products containing palm oils. Production of palm oils starts with chopping palm trees, because that's where palm oils come from, meaning that production of palm oils lead to deforestation.
Plant plants!
2
Although planting plants at home doesn't compensate for global deforestation, plants are great since they store CO2 naturally, as they need CO2 for photosynthesis. Plants will enlive your house, and purify the air while collecting some CO2!
3
Use less paper!
If your job or home consumes a lot of paper, try to take action and change that! Try to simply use less paper, or swap out paper for something else. Perhaps swapping out the paper for a whiteboard or digitalizing paperwork will do the trick?
Endangered species
Many different species of animals, plants, insects and fungi are become endangered and going instinct much faster than usual at an alarming rate. But why do we need to have so many different species, why are they important? And how many species are endangered?
What are endangered species?
An entire species goes extinct when the last individual of a species like an animal, plant, insect or fungi dies. Endangered species are classified endangered when there are very few individuals left of a species, and their species are threatened of extinction. The global red-list IUCN Red List Of Threathend Species has considered about 157 000 of all known species in the world if they are endangered, and more than 44 000 of them are! That is roughly 28% of the considered species! In the world though, there are a lot more species, but we don't really know exactly how many there is. The number of identified species lies around 2.16 million species according to Our World In Data, but they warn about the possibility for one specie being identified as two different in some instances.
Photo by: Uriel Soberanes
Photo of an orangutan
Causes and consequences:
Loss of habitat and food alternatives is a big reason for animals becoming endangered. Loss of habitat can happen due to deforestation, forest fires,
ice melting etc, and for marine life it can occur due to loss of coral reefs. Animals might lose their food alternatives due to loss of habitat, less rainwater, less plants and fruits, and also less animals. Beacause if one animal moves, it can affect the whole foodchain, causing other animals in the same foodchain to lose their food options.
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Endangered animals can cause imbalance in ecosystems and can affect other animals in the food chain negatviely, also impacting the different insects, bees, fungi and decomposeres and more that gives us food and that keeps the cycle of the nature going.
Animals going extinct affects the biodiversity in that area and essentially in the whole world as well. Biodiversity(The diversity of plant and animal life) is important beacause it forms a structure for life on which we depend for a lot of things like stable climate, food, water and a lot more, according to the United Nations.
How can we help maintain great biodiversity?
Species go extinct due to climate change in the form of habitatloss, which often include deforestation, coral bleaching, icemelting and others, depending on what kind of habitat the specie lives in. Therefore everything you can do to help prevent climate change, plastic pollution, deforestation and habitatloss, will also help maintain the great biodiversity on earth!​​
Here is a list of a few things you can do to help prevent more species from going extinct:
Use less plastic!
1
Plastic harms animals, it especially interupts the oceanlife. Plastic contain chemicals that are dangerous for animals. Not only that, but animals can also get trapped in plastic, ingest it, and suffocate. To help prevent this, consciously reducing plastic consumption is a great start!
Recycle!
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Give an effort to recycle the trash you produce, so that it can be reused and doesn't have to be replaced! If you want to take it a step further you can also help keep your environment clean by picking up plastic and trash outdoors and recycling it!
3
Make a beehive!
If you have a garden, giving some of that space to the life nearby is great for biodiversity! By planting plants, making a beehive, a bird feeder or something similar you're creating an ecosystem for the wild life in your garden! If you don't have a garden, but perhaps a balcony, a bird feeder or some plants there can be a great contribution!
Plastic pollution
Our oceans and our nature is getting filled with plastic and garbage and it is affecting the biodiversity here on earth more than ever, and indirectly empowering the greenhouse effect. But why does this matter? And how much plastic really ends up in the ocean?
What is plastic pollution?
Platic pollution is when plastics ends up in the nature and does harm to different kinds of species and the nature itself. Every year, we humans use over 311 000 000 tons of plastic across the globe! This means that 591 tons of plastic gets used every minute globaly, and in the same time period, 15 tons of plastic gets released into the ocean, according to NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), in a video from 2017.
Photo by: John Cameron
Photo of trash lying on the ground
Photo by: Hermes Rivera
Photo of a boy walking between piles of trash and plastic
Causes and consequences:
Plastic pollution is caused by plastic not getting recycled or thrown away correctly. Every piece of trash or plastic you throw or see on the street will most definetly end up in the ocean. This happens beacause of wind and rainfall dragging the plastic into the rivers and oceans that are nearby. And this also happens when plastic doesn't get recycled correctly. In some poor areas it is also quite common to throw trash directly in the nature, rivers and oceans nearby, beacause the inhabitants have nowhere else to throw it away. Plastic pollution will have a lot of consequences like animals that will die and get endangered, and plastic will be everywhere in the nature and oceans and it will affect the life there negatively. Animals often think that plastic is food, so they eat it and then they get a fake
feeling that they're full. This can make them starve, or even get choked. Also plastic needs a lot of energy to be produced. For producing one kilogram of plastic, you would need to kilograms of oil, according to NRK from the same video made in 2017. When all of the energy neccesary to make plastic don't even get used properly, and rather affects the nature negatively, it has a huge impact on the climate and the earth. If you recycle, you will give the plastic you have used another life, and it would also do so that there is no need to produce a replacement for the plastic you have used.​​
How can we stop plastic pollution?
To stop plastic pollution we need to prevent plastic from getting in the nature and the oceans, we need to clean up the plastic that we already have polluted and we need to use less plastic.
Here is a list of a few things you can do to help prevent plastic pollution:
Recycle!
1
Recycling enables trash to be reused and utilized in new products for other people! It prevents the necessity of replacing plastic in new products. If recycling isn't optimal in your area, try to command it!
Recycle!
2
Give an effort to recycle the trash you produce, so that it can be reused and doesn't have to be replaced! If you want to take it a step further you can also help keep your environment clean by picking up plastic and trash outdoors and recycling it!
3
Pick up some plastic!
Helping to clean up the streets and your nearby area leaves a positive impact your nearby area and helps prevent plastic pollution! Plastic and trash tends to end up in rivers, lakes and oceans, because of wind and downfall dragging it to these areas. Picking up trash and plastic will disable it from travelling and polluting the oceans, rivers etc.