Nature is not healing and global warming effects on the earth are far worse than once predicted: floods, wildfires, lethal heat waves are just the most kown consequences. Let’s clarify what is already happening.
Global warming effects on temperature
It’s important to have clear that climate is different from weather. Maybe you live somewhere where the winter was the coldest in the last decade, or summer was not as hot as it used to be. This means nothing to climate change.
Climate is another concept, not measure on day by day temperatures, but in a more globalised optic. If global warming was a dispersion chart, the weather would be the dots, and climate the line that shows up as an outcome of these dots.
IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, is a group formed in the late 20s to monitor, research, explain and try to solve all climate crisis we’re facing due to the absurd CO2 emissions we caused since the Industrial Revolution.
Since 1800, the global average temperature jumped from 13.73°C to YYYY – and the global warming predictions are not good. We speak more about that about explaining the expected global warming effects.
Climate change effects on planet
Floods
Due to the changes in rain patterns, extreme storms are becoming more common. This storms are making people loose their houses, and also leading to several losts in agricultural goods.
Droughts
Still on the rain subject, while we have extreme storms in some places, we have absolutely no rain in others. So, yes, long droughts can be a extinction matter, since we only survive for around 48h without proper hydration.
This is a direct problem, but we have issues related to the water scarcity. Without water, no plant can grow. It will definetely impact the food production in the world.
This would already be a issue is a equal world, but that’s not reality, right? The disbalance in food distribution in rich and poor countries is a wide open problem, and apparently this is just the beginning.
We also have a energy problem here: there’s countries like Brazil whose main energy source hydrolectrical, a renewable source that depends on, well: water.
Desertication
Desertification depends on several factors. First, there’s the problem of the total lack of rain in some places.
This happens because of the lack of trees, that are responsible to create the floating rivers phenomenum: in their breath process, the generate a lot of umidity, that generates rain.
Other problem is livestock. Farmers destroy the natural plants so that cows can use space. There’s so many cows and they are so heavy, that little by little they are pressuring the ground, compacting it and avoiding the soil power to make something grow.
After sometime, the ground looses it’s capability to absorve water or nutrients, and then it starts to become a desert.
Sea level rising
As you might know at this point, the polar ice caps are melting. This is extremely dangerous to humankind. Not only because 80% of the fresh water available in this planet is in the Arctic.
On top of the hydric crisis that will hit us hard between 2030 and 2040, all this melted ice is going somewhere, right?
It’s going to the oceans.
All the huge glaciers are becoming part of the seas, and that’s a huge contributor to sea level rise.
Unfortunately, this is not the only cause.
Now, I’ll rely a little bit in your chemistry knowledge ok? What happen when you have water molecules and you heat them up? Yes, they expand.
This is a barely known fact, but actually a good percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere is trapped by the sea water.
But this carbon is still there, warming up the oceans and forcing these water molecules to expand.
So, it’s not just more water in the sea, it’s “bigger” water.
This, of course, is one of the most dramatic effect of global warming. The oceans are advancing in the coast direction. The tsunamis tends to get worse than they were in the past and, at a very cruel level of climate change, many cities that we know will disappear.
Some famous examples? The Maldive Islands, Hawai and Florida have great chances of simply desappear from the world map.
Ocean warming
The ocean warming endangerous humankind existence. Not only because it contributes to sea level rise, but because without marine life, there’s no human lifes.
That’s because ocean has also the power of generating oxygen. Basically, 50-80% of our oxygens comes from the water.
Planktons and algae are capable of photosynthesis, they turn CO2 into oxygen.
However, with the ocean heating, these ocean plants are dying and, well, they can’t breathe.
So even if we could prepare to sea level rising, we wouldn’t be so luck with oxygen lack.
If you ever watched “Our Warming Ocean” documentary, you know how serious is this situation. If you never watched it, we highly recommend.
Lethal heat waves
A heat wave is considered lethal when it’s above 39.4°C, but temperatures are higher than that. There’s some African regions in which the temperatures can reach 50° in summer, which is just unbearable for human life.
The point is not only how high the temperatures can get, because what really matters is contrast. You must have heard that a heat wave in Europe and China was the cause of hundreds of deaths.
If you’re body is used to an average temperature, and your house is structured considering this temperature, you don’t have ways to protect yourself of a drastic change as we live in lethal heat waves. Many elderely people have died because their bodies just couldn’t handle the heat.
Global warming effects on humans
Climate change effects are cruel, we have health effects and social effects. Some of them are:
- Air quality
- Food scarcity
- Massive migrations
- Pooverty and crime
- Life loss
Global warming predictions
As natures depends human actions on other species and environment, it’s difficult to just guess a number of temperature increase. The IPCC scients, though, elaborated some scenarios that might happen due to climate change in this century
